SCDOT “Lane Diets” Aim to Make North Murray Ave. Safer
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On Anderson’s north side, before the road crews and the orange barrels arrive, North Murray Avenue looks almost peaceful. In the middle of the day, it carries the slow choreography of commuters, delivery trucks, and parents on the school run, a sequence of familiar movements repeated so often that they have become, for the people who live nearby, a kind of background music. It is only when you try to turn left—across two lanes of oncoming traffic, toward a side street or a neighborhood park—that the composition begins to fray.
The South Carolina Department of Transportation has a term for what it wants to do with this stretch of road. It calls the project a “lane diet.” Between North Main Street and Bleckley Street, along a segment of U.S. 76 that locals know less by its number than by the feeling of squeezing between turning traffic and parked cars, the state is preparing to resurface the pavement and redraw the lines that regulate its interior life, without adding so much as an inch of new asphalt. The stated goal is modest and sweeping at once: to improve safety and ease traffic along a corridor that has quietly become one of the city’s more anxious pieces of infrastructure.
Formally, the work is known as the U.S. 76 from N. Main St. to Bleckley St. Safety Project, a title that suggests an engineering exercise in friction reduction. According to the state’s online project portal, SCDOT plans to pair routine resurfacing with a new pattern of lane markings that will change how drivers, and potentially cyclists and pedestrians, move through Murray Avenue. In its most common form, a lane diet trims a four-lane undivided road down to three: one lane in each direction, with a center lane reserved for left turns. It is a small act of subtraction intended to produce a larger sense of order. Everything happens within the existing width of the street; the work is less an act of expansion than of reinterpretation—restriping in lieu of widening, a revision rather than a rewrite.
In this case, the revision is nested inside a larger, more mundane cycle of maintenance. The new lane markings are part of a resurfacing project funded through SCDOT’s pavement improvement program, the sprawling annual effort that sends fresh asphalt crews out across the state. Because each resurfaced road must be repainted anyway, the agency notes, the Murray Avenue lane changes come with essentially no added striping cost; the new configuration is, in budgetary terms, a different way of doing something that was already scheduled to be done. Along with the resurfacing, SCDOT is also rebuilding two traffic signals: one at U.S. 76 (East North Street) and Whitehall Road, another at U.S. 76 (Club Drive/Park Drive/North Murray Avenue) and West Mauldin Street, the two junctions that frame the project’s most complicated movements.
Like most transportation projects, this one has an origin story, and like many such stories it begins with complaints.
“This project started with many requests from the public for SCDOT to make improvements for vehicles turning left from East North Street onto Whitehall,” an agency official explained.
The intersection, where a major east–west route meets a busy north–south corridor, had become a test of patience and nerve. The most efficient way to improve it, SCDOT concluded, was not with new flyovers or roundabouts but with something humbler: dedicated left-turn lanes. To thread those lanes into the existing pavement, the department worked with the City of Anderson to develop a pavement-marking plan that introduces bike lanes and carries the new pattern through the Linley Park area, ending at Bleckley Street.
For now, most of the work is still invisible.
“We expect this project to begin soon; in fact, the contractor is already working on full-depth patching along this route in anticipation of starting the resurfacing project this spring,” the SCDOT official said. The timeline has the compressed, slightly hopeful quality common to roadwork announcements. The project will take several months, SCDOT estimates, and is expected to be finished by the summer. If the engineering is straightforward, the timing is carefully choreographed: the state has synchronized the lane changes with the resurfacing so that the fresh asphalt and the new traffic pattern arrive together, sparing drivers the experience of two separate disruptions.
Behind the antiseptic language of “safety improvements” sits a more radical notion about what a street is for. The familiar version of Murray Avenue—four undivided lanes, each a narrow, impatient river of cars—is a product of a mid-century idea that the highest purpose of a city street is to move as many motor vehicles as quickly as possible. A road diet suggests the opposite: that by asking cars to do a little less, the street as a whole can safely do more. In transportation circles, the center turn lane is praised not only for reducing rear-end collisions but for calming traffic; drivers, finding fewer lanes to dart between, often proceed more slowly, and crossing the street becomes less like a sprint.
None of this will be decided in abstraction. For several weeks, residents will have a chance to consider what, exactly, this new Murray Avenue should be. The public-comment period for the project runs through March 13, a window in which the state’s diagrams and performance metrics will meet the lived experience of people who use the street every day. SCDOT has promised that this will not be a purely bureaucratic ritual: formal opportunities for public input will continue during the engineering design phase, a sign that the drawings are not yet fully inked in and that the complaints and suggestions of drivers, business owners, and neighbors may still leave a mark.
In the meantime, the road exists in two versions. There is the Murray Avenue that people know now, with its familiar bottlenecks and improvised maneuvers, and there is the Murray Avenue that appears on the SCDOT project portal, rendered in plain view, all lines and arrows and legend boxes. For those inclined to watch the transformation unfold—and to try to influence it—the state is directing them to that web page, where the U.S. 76 from N. Main St. to Bleckley St. Safety Project can be followed with a click, turning a local concern into something that arrives, intermittently, as an email notification. In that sense, the lane diet is not only a reconfiguration of space but of attention: a busy urban artery domesticated first on screen, then in paint, and finally in the everyday movements of the people who cross it.
