Next time you're stuck in traffic on Savannah Highway, which will be the next time you're on Savannah Highway, consider this:

In 20 years, there will be about 50 percent more traffic on West Ashley roads — which means something like an extra 13 billion cars a day cruising past all those lovely strip malls, car dealerships and fast-food restaurants.

You think it's bad now, imagine how long the line at Krispy Kreme will be then.

A mile away from all this clutter, between Wappoo cut and Limehouse boat landing, lies one of the most beautiful, unspoiled, undiscovered Lowcountry vistas this side of the ACE Basin, and a river runs through it.

Now, here's your choice: You can let West Ashley get as crowded as Tokyo, or take a $500 million chance on making things a bit better.

But if you do, you might have to ruin the Lowcountry vista with a couple of big, ugly concrete bridges over the Stono River (not to mention what happens to Johns Island).

That's what it's like to live in West Ashley these days and ponder the Mark Clark Expressway extension. You're doomed if you do, doomed if you don't.

After a year or so to digest this 40-year-old idea, a lot of people still don't know how they feel about it. The ones who support it do so grudgingly. They have come to grips with inevitability.

"It's just not going to do what they're talking about," says Jerry Johnson, president of the Moreland Neighborhood Association. "When you reroute water, it finds somewhere else to go. This is the only relief we can expect. That's the only relief I see."

The other night, a bunch of West Ashley neighborhood groups got together to talk about this.

They grilled the Department of Transportation, and dismissed the Coastal Conservation League's alternative — a bunch of smaller routes through neighborhoods — as the crazy scheme of latte drinkers.

This is what happens when you ask the public to get involved.

So far, the public meetings haven't produced much, other than grousing.

Some have suggested we build nothing. That's constructive.

A few say they just need to better synchronize traffic lights.

Truth is, Hernan Pena, the city's Department of Transportation director, has got those lights timed perfectly — there's only so much you can do with traffic counts that read like the theory of relativity.

Somebody even said "light rail." Is that like the train that runs to Epcot?

State Rep. Leon Stavrinakis, D-Charleston, did something amazing at that meeting: he told the truth (apparently he didn't read the Statehouse politician's handbook). Stavrinakis said if the $500 million from the state Infrastructure Bank doesn't go to building 526 pretty much as it was originally proposed, we don't get that money.

You can't spend it on pretty streets, widening projects, or fancy bike paths. It will be redistributed to Greenville, Columbia or Myrtle Beach.

It's 526 or nothing — and that's what Stavrinakis succinctly, and accurately, described as "political reality."

So there we are.

Will the 526 extension solve all our problems? No.

Will it help? Yeah, some.

Is it ideal?

Not by a long shot.

Reach Brian Hicks at 937-5561 or bhicks@postandcourier.com.

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