Pave prosperity's path forward by modernizing I-26

For more than 50 years, Interstate 26 has been our super highway to the rest of the world. It has been our way to work, to college, to family trips, and always the way home.

The late Palmer Gaillard once declared that "one day we'll look back and see that I-26 wrote the modern history of this community." The lovable former mayor of Charleston made a point that resonates today. Highways don't really write history, but they can define it, and I-26 has done just that in Greater Charleston. It has been a broad corridor of service and development, attracting population growth, more subdivisions, more commercial places, and more connectivity with the rest of South Carolina.

And that adds up to compounding volumes of travelers going more places as the region has grown functionally, socially and economically over the last half-century.

Mr. Gaillard's long-ago prediction conveys a simple truth: Greater Charleston has an ever-growing dependence on I-26. But the awkward truth is we've failed in its maintenance.

We've never treated the old highway like it serves us, but more like the proverbial rented mule. Today, in the Charleston to Columbia segment, the highway bleeds with pavement failures, insufficient lane capacities and bridge and overpass deficiencies. Congestion and outdated designs engender unsafe conditions. Accident rates are generally high, and there's a well-documented disproportionate fatality rate, especially in the Orangeburg to Summerville segment.

Back in the mid-'60s, I-26 finally opened in the Lowcountry as the state's new technical education system was keying an industrial transformation of the South Carolina economy. The State Ports Authority was barely 20 years old and investing heavily in the Port of Charleston as a world trade gateway that would give advantages to industrial and agricultural interests all over South Carolina. Our state was getting its competitive act together.

If we've learned anything since the '60s, it is that competition never ends, and today Greater Charleston's economic prospects never have seemed better. The Boeing dynamic already is in play, spawning new businesses and jobs. The Port of Charleston seems poised to reverse its market slide with deeper federal shipping channels in Charleston Harbor. Greater Charleston has become South Carolina's "go to" economic center.

The State Ports Authority's quest for deeper federal navigation channels at Charleston Harbor has rallied the public's awareness of strategic infrastructure. It's been encouraging to watch South Carolina roll up its sleeves and challenge those feisty Savannahians (or whatever you call them) to put up their dukes. The face-off has generated a renewed spirit all over the Palmetto State. There's reason to be hopeful that in the long run, Charleston will get what Savannah cannot have -- a 50-foot deep federal navigation channel for Charleston Harbor.

But among elected leaders who have taken up the competitive fight with Georgia -- and especially Gov. Nikki Haley who has promised final victory -- surely there's an awareness that 50-foot channel ports serving a vibrant port-Panamax market need equally reliable and modern interstate highways. For the Port of Charleston, that can only be I-26, our dependable but old worn-out rented-mule highway.

In post-Panamax markets, intermodal container movements through Charleston could easily sustain a 6 to 8 percent annual growth pattern. That would produce a virtual doubling of current port volumes within 9 to 12 years. More than 70 per cent of "intermodal" containers arrive and depart by truck, most via I-26. That will not change, even with better rail facilities. The prospects of a decade of post-Panamax operations that double port-related traffic on I-26 as we know it today simply doesn't compute.

For all its economic operations and its development prospects, Greater Charleston depends upon its logistical strengths -- and we should understand with supreme clarity that I-26 is the great nexus of our region's multi-modal infrastructure. Pat Barber of North Charleston, a trucking industry leader and owner of Superior Transportation, says, "It's time we understood how important I-26 is to Charleston and the entire state; it's time to face its realities; it's time to make it what it must be."

He's right, of course, but to modernize I-26, we're talking about a billion-dollar project, maybe more, and a timetable that would likely span a decade or more. Big highway projects are tough public policy ventures in South Carolina -- as we've seen in the I-526 completion debacle.

But Mr. Barber's tight message is that the I-26 imperative can no longer be ignored. It can be and should be the project that confronts our state's backward ways in addressing market-driven highway projects. Let's confront, too, the fact that South Carolina competes as a progressive state, but with an underlying pretension about public infrastructure.

Our collective taxpayer mindset portrays a certain satisfaction in having the nation's fourth lowest state gasoline user tax -- and an affected ignorance of the proposition that with roadway infrastructure we get what we pay for.

Our state's ambitions for market-demand economic development require that this pattern of inertia must change. If it doesn't -- and soon -- Georgia and many other states will be eating every slice of our economic development cake.

Ron Brinson, a North Charleston city councilman, served as president/CEO of the American Association of Ports Authorities from 1979-86 and president/CEO of the Port of New Orleans from 1986-2003. He is a former associate editor of this newspaper. He can be reached at rbrin1013@gmail.com.