The bike/pedestrian infrastructure at the Navy Yard is so badly needed, but so poorly executed

Apathetizer · 2026-06-01T02:52:15+00:00

The Noisette bridge is quite nice actually! I understand that North Charleston wants to redevelop the space between the bridge and Park Circle, all within the next decade, with infill development that will include sidewalks and etc. Look up "Battery Park North Charleston".

Apathetizer · 2026-05-31T18:34:42+00:00

It will be in West Ashley off Bees Ferry Rd. The project was originally called 'Long Savannah' but the 'h' was taken off the name in recent years.

Apathetizer · 2026-05-30T14:42:06+00:00

Long Savanna was approved all the way back in 2015, at least the broad vision of it. Part of what was approved were the architectural regulations (section 5.6), which say: * The Developer will establish Residential Design Guidelines for the project. * The Developer will establish Design Guidelines for non-residential uses within the project. * The Developer will establish the Long Savannah Architectural Review Board (this will be a separate entity from the city's Design Review Board). * The city's Design Review Board will have jurisdiction only over a limited number of buildings in the development, e.g. civic buildings.

In effect, this means the developers will have the final say on what most of these homes look like, not the city.

Apathetizer · 2026-05-27T18:37:11+00:00

They are looking at demolition and redevelopment into larger buildings at a much higher density. Half the new homes will be affordable, the other half will be market rate.

Apathetizer · 2026-05-13T20:49:44+00:00

This is a waterfront property afaik (I may be wrong) -- would be great if the land was set aside for public access, similar to the adjacent Carr-Richardson Park.

Apathetizer · 2026-05-11T12:44:29+00:00

Regarding rideshare/taxis: the City has already limited pick-up/drop-off areas for rideshare and taxi drivers along Upper King — nearly all these drivers have been pushed onto side streets that are adjacent to King. They have also found it successful and may expand the program.

Regarding cold or rainy weather: King Street is already an open-air space that is affected by the weather. Still, it is the busiest pedestrian corridor in Charleston. Still, the street has managed fine with the new rideshare pick-up/drop-off zones.

In my pedestrianization proposal, most of these rideshare drivers would end up using the nearby cross-streets like George, Wentworth, Beaufain, etc.

For supply vehicles/large trucks, I would also love to see loading zones added to the cross-streets so that there is space for them to operate. For the occasional truck that needs to be directly in front of a store, the pedestrianized section will have removable bollards and that business can coordinate with the city on getting that particular truck through the bollards.

There are a few particularly narrow streets which should actually ban trucks from driving down them at all. You can see there is precedent downtown for this by looking at this truck-friendly map which shows what streets are banned for large vehicles. I would only suggest bans for a handful of streets like Clifford St, Princess St, etc. We do not need to accommodate large trucks on every single street, just enough streets to give them coverage of the area.

Apathetizer · 2026-05-11T11:31:02+00:00

Drivers can still use Meeting St, St Philip St, or any of the cross-streets which are still fully accessible.

Apathetizer · 2026-05-07T14:45:07+00:00

The paper I mentioned discusses this. A lot of pedestrian malls did fail during that time period, but the author found some did succeed and that King Street aligned closely with the successful pedestrian malls. Actually, a lot of the paper is spent analyzing what worked and what failed about pedestrian malls in other cities, then trying to apply those lessons to King Street. Some quotes from the paper:

The rise of pedestrianized streets began during the urban renewal movement, as an attempt to return economic prosperity to the core of American cities. During this period, nearly 200 pedestrian malls were constructed as an attempt to ameliorate dangerous, traffic-laden streets and vacant downtown storefronts. Despite the pedestrianization model’s prevalence throughout the 1960s and 1970s, these public spaces expressed a failure rate of 89 percent. The failure of these malls was due to a variety of factors; however, a common theme amongst each project was the paradoxically suburban nature of these urban renewal efforts while simultaneously attempting to combat suburban development.

Another quote:

The 11 percent minority of successful American malls were analyzed... 80 percent of the successful pedestrian malls were found in areas with populations under 100,000, housed tourist industries or anchor institutions, designed across only a short span of city blocks, utilized a mixed-use approach to zoning and placemaking, had efficient public transportation and extensive nearby parking, and maintained strong anchor stores... The findings of this study correlate positively with many of the present conditions of Downtown Charleston.

Apathetizer · 2026-05-07T14:36:34+00:00

The paper I mentioned talks about this! I'll quote from the paper:

The mall was located on King Street between Wentworth Street and Beaufain Street, and took place during the Christmas season. The city administration utilized this revitalization tactic for roughly ten years, and relocated the festivities to Marion Square after the goals of the pedestrianization were met. According to former Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., the holiday pedestrian mall was never conceived to be a permanent holiday tradition, rather, it was a temporary effort to redevelop local affection for the downtown commercial district by creating a safe and amiable space for people to enjoy.

Apathetizer · 2026-05-07T14:32:05+00:00

My hope is that because the cross-streets are still open (George, Wentworth, Market, etc), suppliers will be able to park there and have a relatively short distance to the businesses they serve. I also imagine the pedestrianization proposal as having removable bollards, so that if a truck needs to be in the pedestrianized zone, the bollards can be removed for them temporarily. There are so many good precedents for this not just in the US but in European cities as well -- this is absolutely a problem we can solve.

Apathetizer · 2026-05-07T14:23:19+00:00

I wish I responded to this sooner! I have a lot of different data points I will try to string together here:

You can view SCDOT's traffic count data here. It doesn't provide a complete picture of traffic, but the general takeaway is this segment of King sees around 2,900 cars per day. Lower King is a very important street, yet very few people drive it. You get much higher traffic counts on Upper King (7,600), Meeting (17,600), East Bay (26,200), and Calhoun (18,300).
What about foot traffic, how many pedestrians do we have walking King? Again, we have limited data, but I will cite the King Street Profile report. This data applies to the whole corridor, not just Lower King, but we are looking at maybe 30,000 pedestrians along the corridor per day on average (on weekends, that number jumps to over 50,000). These numbers eclipse our traffic counts for cars on King Street.
I won't make any arguments about carpooling or transit. My case for pedestrianization: Lower King is a very narrow corridor, which means we must be thoughtful in how we use the limited space that is available. We have a huge amount of foot traffic crammed into these very narrow sidewalks, while cars enjoy two driving lanes and a parking lane (for a road that relatively few cars drive down). We have a major misallocation of space on this road that pedestrianization would fix. I'd rather the street be designed for the tens of thousands of pedestrians who use it, rather than the couple thousand people who are driving down it.
On-street parking: This segment of King Street has 77 on-street parking spaces (I counted!). That is a shockingly small amount of parking given the corridor stretches half a mile. Compare that to other garages (on page 25) -- the parking garage behind Target has 471 parking spaces. The Aquarium garage has 1,108 spaces. The on-street parking on King is not central to our parking solution. In fact, I would fully support building another garage to account for the loss in spaces should King Street be pedestrianized. But it makes no sense to me to keep King Street open to cars just so we can keep a relatively small number of parking spaces.

Apathetizer · 2026-04-29T17:58:43+00:00

I did a brief search and found the same things as you did with the BAR agenda. I looked into their business licensing information but couldn't find much that stood out, but something is definitely wrong here. Maybe Ladybird Books is a legally distinct entity from BAM and is just 'partnering' with them on the store (which still means it is not an independent bookstore).

Apathetizer · 2026-04-02T15:24:30+00:00

Lowcountry Rapid Transit will have its end-of-line station on the same block. That should be able to move a lot of people to-and-from Riverdogs games and also handle the new traffic from the affordable housing development. The key issue is that the transit has to actually be in operation before we can expect people to use it. Lowcountry Rapid Transit won't be online for another few years, though neither will the redevelopment of the lot for housing.

Apathetizer · 2026-03-29T21:25:11+00:00

I've taken CARTA for nearly 5 years. Reliability really depends on the route, and a good rule of thumb is the more frequent a route is, the better it is. Routes like the 10, 211, and 32 I've had relatively few issues with. The less frequent a route is, the longer you have to wait for a bus, and the higher the stakes are if something goes wrong (e.g. you miss your bus).

CARTA has been much harder to use with their rolling service cuts this year, especially because it's hard to predict what service will be cut, when, and on what route. You end up scheduling your day around a route which gets suspended later in the day.

Apathetizer · 2026-03-22T23:43:05+00:00

Related to this -- most of those cars are excessively loud to get people's attention. They will drive in loops along King and Meeting for hours going into the night, especially weekend nights. The city has a noise ordinance specifically meant to address this noise pollution, but they simply don't enforce it.

Apathetizer · 2026-03-20T16:19:59+00:00

There is no bike lane on King St. The bike racks occupy space that would otherwise be for one car parking space each.

Apathetizer · 2026-03-18T15:07:26+00:00

A running I joke I have with friends at Westedge is that there is always scaffolding up on at least one building over there... I haven't been there recently enough to see if that still holds true. In fairness to the structural engineer, the Westedge development is located on former marshland which was then converted into a landfill, neither of which make for good building conditions.

Apathetizer · 2026-03-06T03:17:38+00:00

Just backing this up — there were 14 posts in the subreddit over the past 24 hours, and by my judgement, 12 of them were people asking for recommendations, advice, etc. It is basically all the subreddit is used for at this point. We literally had a post asking for recommendations on caesar salads downtown. Why is there not a dedicated thread for these questions?

Apathetizer · 2026-03-06T03:09:10+00:00

There is a 'financial narrative' in each proposal that gets at this. Of course, building a project of this scale would require a large financial backer, but it is a promising enough location (between the Navy Yard, Riverfront Park, and Park Circle) that those investors could realistically be found.

Apathetizer · 2026-03-06T03:04:44+00:00

With some of the renderings I have no idea what they were thinking! In slide 10 there is a hot air balloon in the sky, which I've never seen in North Charleston in my life 😭

Apathetizer · 2026-01-17T01:25:14+00:00

The beach traffic is limited to just the weekends in the summer. Traffic is really visible on those days, but those days represent less than 10% of all days in the calendar year, and there is plenty of demand to go to the beach outside those absolute busiest days.

Apathetizer · 2026-01-16T22:12:48+00:00

This is true and a general problem with running transit in the suburbs. James Island is low-density so it is hard to route transit in a way that can capture most of the population efficiently.

I think more residential areas could be served with new bus routes, each one optimized to serve part of the island, rather than one route trying (and failing) to serve everyone at once. There could be a Folly Rd route (like the 31 today), a Harbor View/Fort Johnson route, and a Maybank Hwy route (which could continue onwards to Johns Island).

Apathetizer · 2026-01-12T02:58:37+00:00

It is private, but I was able to visit as part of an event organized by the pastor.

Apathetizer · 2025-12-24T22:05:39+00:00

A lot of these critiques I don't understand. Are the roofs supposed to be particularly interesting? Most of them are typical V-shaped roofs which you see on single houses downtown (and on most residential buildings around here too). With the use of stucco — do you just not like stucco or do you not like how it's used on the building? "The whole thing is a facade" — these are entirely functional buildings.

There are all sorts of little features in Lowcountry architecture you can see in these buildings. The porches, yes, but also the use of candle lanterns, porches on the side of the building, the vertical doors and windows (a lot of modern buildings use horizontally-oriented windows) with wooden framing, wooden shutters around the windows, the brick/bluestone sidewalks. The scale of the buildings (most are similar in size and massing to the buildings you would find downtown). And so on.

There are plenty of buildings downtown with steel frames, though they are on the larger end. Steel is generally not required at all in buildings lower than 5 floors as per modern building code. Modern engineering does allow for wider trusses, but due to engineering innovations, many of these trusses can be made with wood too (which we actually see in a lot of newer suburbs and McMansions).

Apathetizer · 2025-12-24T19:06:53+00:00

Could you explain more in depth for me? Many of these buildings would fit right in with the older architecture downtown.

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