At a recent meeting, and for the second time, I have been elected Vice Chair of the Greenville-Pickens Area Transportation Study (GPATS). GPATS is a federally-designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), a structure that helps prioritize and spend a portion of federal transportation funding to ensure local oversight and input. 

GPATS’ “Policy Committee”, which makes the final determinations, consists of mayors, state legislators, county council members, DOT Commissioners, and a few others from around the area. We meet quarterly to review project updates and make recommendations on funding levels.

GPATS receives roughly $29 million per year to allocate for road and intersection improvements across a region that spans nearly all of Greenville County and portions of Anderson, Pickens, Spartanburg, and Laurens counties. At about $1 million per mile to pave a road these days, those funds don’t sit on the shelf for long.

GPATS funding typically is prioritized for big or complex projects - ones that, without federal funding, may not become a reality for our communities. 

One of those projects is the Woodruff Road Congestion Relief Project. First added to the GPATS “Transportation Improvement Plan” (TIP) in 2017, this project, in short, would create a parallel road running from behind Trader Joe’s and Target on Woodruff Road down to Smith Hines Road in Mauldin. With limited curb cuts, roundabouts, and other improvements - its intention is to relieve traffic along Woodruff Road. 

The project has been in the works for a long time now, nearly ten years. Much of the work thus far has been in aligning funding and working on acquiring right of way (which is no small feat), plus continued engineering and design work. 

The price tag of this project has sat at $128M for the last few years, with GPATS contributing about $45M alongside funding from the County and State Infrastructure Bank.

At a recent meeting to review this and other major projects, we learned that the Woodruff Road project had ballooned to an estimated $277M - more than doubling in cost. Kudos goes to the team at SC DOT and the GPATS staff for having detailed answers to the reasons behind those increases and being able to field a lot of complex questions.

The first solution proposed to make the project whole is to commit and tie up and commit a large portion of future GPATS funding, to support this project – a strategy I understand, but have concerns over.

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