Pulling Out All the Stops

Located on the rural end of the Savannah Highway motor mile, out past the Interstate 526 onramps, sits the Melrose Neighborhood.
Built in the late 1950s, Melrose’s layout is a mix of urban and rural, with bigger yards and old school working class cinderblock slab homes squatting near the Melrose Drive entrance. Deeper in the yards and homes get larger and some have two floors. Deeper still the houses get bigger, more modern, with sidings and vinyl windows.
But the overall design of the neighborhood remains quiet, with tree-lined streets and neighbors sitting on front porches early on Friday afternoons waving at passing cars, whether they know the drivers or not.
Melrose is not downtown. And it’s not Bees Ferry or Avondale either.
But Melrose, which used to border forests and farms, now counts a huge car lot as its neighbor and is framed by major traffic arteries like Savage Road. As such, the neighborhood was built before things got so fast and, like so many neighborhoods in the area, struggles with traffic.
Traveling down Melrose Drive in the afternoon, you’ll see drivers slow at the intersection where Trent Street comes in from the left and somehow magically changes into Catawba Street on the right.
Neighborhood drivers slow because they’re used to the four-way stop that used to be there. It was there until last Thursday, when county workers dug up the signs, blacked-out the former white traffic lines announcing the four-way, and posted signs about the change.
But still they slow. Neighborhood resident Cindi Kirkland wishes they’d still stop. Kirkland’s son was hit on one of the neighborhood streets years ago, and another neighbor’s child was struck in recent years.
Kirkland took it upon herself to advocate for the four-way stop, sending letters and making appearances in front of various county officials.
“I am bewildered that our neighbors who live in Melrose and signed a petition taking down the four-way stop sign are more concerned with having to stop at a stop sign than the safety of our children, family, and friends who walk and ride bicycles on Melrose Drive,” she wrote to county officials and said to just about anybody who would listen.
But the neighborhood council had already made its decision, and it was decidedly against the four-way and told the county as much.
Jim Neal, the county’s director of Public Works, had a crew with a traffic counter sent to Melrose and found the number of cars rolling down Melrose didn’t come close to South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT) requirements for a four-way stop. Any idea of a further traffic study was nixed in the face of a $50,000 consultant price tag.
That finding dovetailed with a petition the neighborhood council rounded up, saying that it was also opposed to the installation of other “traffic calming” devices, even though Trent Street, where council president Brian Stockmaster lives, already has speed humps.
As an amateur bicycle racer, Stockmaster knows a thing or two about the dangers of car traffic. Stockmaster is part of a team of local cyclists who compete in road races across the state and region on weekends, and flee to local streets for training during the weeks.
As an engineer at SPAWAR, Stockmaster can also see the design problems that led to speedy traffic and the increased call for safety down the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare.
Back when Melrose was first built, Stockmaster said, the style was for neighborhoods to have only one entrance and no “interconnectivity” with bordering neighborhoods. “And guess what you get then — traffic. It was not a smart way to build a neighborhood. We know better now,” he said.
The council also looked into getting a traffic signal installed where Melrose Drive dead-ends into Savannah Highway next to the Lexus dealership. County official Neal’s hands were tied, unfortunately. SCDOT requirements, which strictly govern intersections along the highway, are a little tougher and have a little less wriggle room than the county’s approved plan. Another traffic count was taken and found lacking. So no stoplight was installed.
So Melrose residents have to sneak through other neighborhoods to catch the light at Savage. And they will probably continue to slow down at what had been a contentious four-way stop. At least until someone else gets hit. And Kirkland is there to remind everyone that she told them so.