SCDOT Construction on 2 Midway Road Roundabouts Moved to 2027

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

On most afternoons, when the school bell loosens its grip on the day, Midway Road does not so much carry traffic as collect it. Harriet Circle’s odd connection to Midway just north of Midway Elementary School is often a logjam. Crestview Road, shouldering in from the side, offers up its own line of minivans and pickup trucks (many filing back from school runs at Glenview Middle School), and the stop sign at their meeting—this unremarkable scrap of Anderson County geography—becomes a kind of secular altar to growth, delay, and the small agonies of suburban time.

It is here, in the low sprawl between the City of Anderson’s advancing annexations and the steady quiet of Midway Presbyterian Church’s graveyard, that the South Carolina Department of Transportation is working to impose order of a particularly modern kind: not one, but two roundabouts, set within a hundred yards of each other. The project bears the faintly bureaucratic name of the Harris/Midway Crestview Intersection Project, but it is, in essence, a promise to turn a place of idling and irritation into a choreography of yield signs and circulating lanes.

The promise is late. SCDOT’s original schedule had construction beginning in 2025, a date that, like so many in the world of public works, has slipped into the conditional tense. The most recent update speaks instead of 2027, and what was once an imminent makeover has become another entry in the familiar catalog of “in progress” projects—somewhere between design and dirt, pinned beneath the weight of rights-of-way, utility relocations, and permits that have yet to fully materialize.

In the meantime, the roadways do what roadways in fast-growing places do: they reveal, every rush hour, the arithmetic of development. The City of Anderson’s annexation efforts have already brought, or soon will bring, more than 600 new houses into the area near the intersection. Each lot comes with the implied presence of at least one car, often two, and in the compressed window of the school pickup hour, Crestview often backs up with more than 30vehicles waiting at the Midway stop sign, while blocking residents who live in the roads feeding into Crestview. The line, at its worst, is less a queue than a diagnosis.

SCDOT’s answer is geometric. One roundabout will be cut into Midway Road just south of the Midway Presbyterian Cemetery property, reached by a new road that will slip across from Harriet Circle. A second will take shape at the corner of Midway and Crestview, so close to the first that the pair will function almost as a single extended mechanism, slowing drivers and then sending them on again, but with a steadier pulse and fewer moments of standstill.

To make this possible, the map of the neighborhood must be subtly redrawn. A section of Harriet Circle will be realigned into Midway Road, the curve ironed into something more direct, while the northern end of Harriet—the part that currently spills out onto Midway—will be closed. The creek that runs under the road, Cox Creek, will receive its own quiet upgrade: improvements and protections meant to keep the water where it belongs, beneath and beside the pavement, not in it.

For now, the work is largely invisible, taking place in offices and conference calls rather than on the shoulder of Midway Road. SCDOT is still acquiring right-of-way, still in negotiation with utility companies over lines that may need to be lifted and shifted, still chasing the necessary signatures and stamps that move a plan from paper to the rumble of machinery. On the ground, nothing yet circles; the school bell rings, the cars queue, the parents inch forward, and the intersection holds its breath for another year, or two, or more.

The two roundabouts, when they finally arrive, will not undo the annexations or retract the subdivisions that have already been approved. They will, at best, make the daily experience of that growth more bearable—replacing the long, accusatory lines at a stop sign with the more fluid, if occasionally bewildering, etiquette of a modern traffic circle. In the lexicon of infrastructure, this is considered progress: a pair of circles laid over the grid, an attempt to reconcile the velocity of development with the slower, stubborn rhythms of a place that, until recently, had only one way through the intersection, and plenty of time to get there.