A new possibility to relieve Whiskey Road traffic

admin • Aug 30, 2016 News

Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2016 NBC 26 at 5:30

AIKEN, S.C. (WRDW/WAGT) — Whiskey Road sees more than 10,000 cars more than Washington Road in Augusta every day. In hopes of relieving some of that traffic, the city of Aiken is pulling an old plan off the shelf involving Powderhouse Road.

“I think Whiskey’s a nightmare and they keep building all these little fast food places, it’s just going to make it worse,” Cindy Paulson said, who lives in Aiken.

Those concerns are growing for many in Aiken as a new Krispy Kreme and other businesses add to the more than 45,000 cars on Whiskey already. But a new solution could come from Powderhouse Road.

“You won’t get it all and it’s going to create some congestion, but it’s needed,” Henry Faulkner said.

Faulkner has supported the Powderhouse Connector study since leaders first talked about it ten years ago. But Aiken Mayor Rick Osbon announced last week, he is pulling it off the shelf. Engineers say Powderhouse connectors and the improvements on Dougherty Road could decrease traffic by 23 percent.

“It would definitely help us, it would help all the people living here, it’s a growth area,” Faulkner said.

The idea would be to create connecting roads from Powderhouse to Whiskey, allowing people to funnel onto Whiskey at different points. People working at SRS already take Powderhouse as a shortcut and so do neighbors like Paulsen.

“I too take Powderhouse to try to get away from all that traffic over there, so I understand that,” she said.

Paulson feels the city needs to be careful with where the connectors are placed with a big horse community just on the other side of Powderhouse, including Bruce’s Field.

“Why would you turn on Pine Log when you could just keep going straight and bypass all the rest of that traffic, so no I think it’ll bring too much traffic to the horse district,” Paulson said.

Each connector will have its problems though, Faulkner just hopes this time the study stays off the shelf.

“I hope they can get it shorter term and to really get it kick started,” he said.

Now the city doesn’t have an actual timeline yet on when this could all get started, but says they are revisiting and looking at some of the possibilities. Some of those possibilities include multiple Powderhouse connectors to get some of this traffic down.

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Source: News

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