Renovations will widen, landscape medians
Construction will begin April 1 in an effort to make Assembly Street safer for pedestrians. The project is set to conclude in November and must be complete before the opening of the new Darla Moore School of Business at Assembly and Greene Streets, project manager Dwight Cathcart said.
The project will be a joint effort between USC, the city of Columbia and the South Carolina Department of Transportation. The construction will cost about $4.65 million, with $2.7 million coming from USC and $1.95 million from federal grants, according to USC spokesman Wes Hickman.
The project will eliminate metered parking along the Assembly Street medians in favor of wider landscaped medians that will feature “congregation areas” at each end for students to wait to finish crossing the road if they get caught in the middle during a light change.
The medians will feature new landscaping and black iron fences running down the center, much like those already on Sumter and Blossom Streets.
Sidewalks will be extended at crossing areas, creating what Cathcart called “bumpouts,” where students will be able to wait to cross the street. Cathcart said that at peak traffic times, up to 17 students can be waiting to cross Assembly Street at once.
Sidewalks will also be widened to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. An elevator will be added at the top of the steps at the tunnel that runs under Assembly Street, connecting Main Street to the Carolina Coliseum, also to meet ADA regulations, Cathcart said.
The elevator will be adjacent to the Law Center, and there will also be lights and cameras added to the tunnel in order to help students feel safer, Cathcart said.
“Right now, it’s perceived as being dark and dangerous,” he said.
These changes to medians and sidewalks will shorten the distance pedestrians will have to travel across the 150-foot-wide road by 44 feet.
The major impetus for construction is the impending opening of the Darla Moore School of Business. Once it is open, the daily student traffic across Assembly Street will explode, going from 3,000 to between 15,000 and 18,000 students daily, Cathcart said.
Construction will take place between Pendleton and Blossom Streets and start at Pendleton and Assembly Streets in order to minimize the impact on students during the final weeks of the spring semester. Plans have also been made to avoid sidewalk construction during new student orientation, which takes place over six weeks between May and July. Cathcart said that they have taken major events into consideration and tailored their plans around them for the most part.
“It’s not a perfect world, so there are going to be some conflicts with some of those schedules, but we’ve worked to keep them at a minimum,” Cathcart said.
Cathcart, Student Body President Chase Mizzell and Director of Student Services Anna Edwards held a presentation about the upcoming construction with student leaders from University Ambassadors, Orientation Leaders, Student Government, the Residence Hall Association, Greek Life and Off-Campus Student Services Thursday afternoon to help begin spreading the word to students and to field suggestions on how to best communicate information about the project to USC as a whole.
Edwards said that updates on the project would be released twice a month, but that they were looking to do more to get information out.
Multiple students suggested sending information through the Twitter accounts of various colleges and schools within the university, especially those of the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, School of Music and Arnold School of Public Health, all of which have main buildings on Assembly Street. Others suggested a central webpage for all information related to the project and a way to contact relevant parties with concerns and complaints.