I Drive A Lonely Road

There is always some sort of construction going on in Charleston, SC. New apartments and townhomes springing up, new businesses setting up shop, old buildings getting remodeled and repurposed. Growth is constant here. You can’t drive more than a mile without seeing a new set of townhomes popping up or a new business coming in. It’s a beautiful place growth is inevitable.
But with all this growth, the one thing that never seems to be built is our roads.

For a city surrounded by water and split across islands, you’d think traffic planning would be a top priority. Instead, we have a slim number of main roads in and out of neighborhoods and across rivers, creating daily bottlenecks that stretch for miles. Major entries onto highways like 526 and 26 back up constantly, because short turn lane shoulders clog up intersections and block through traffic. A single fender-bender or lane closure can snarl movement for hours. Some neighborhoods only have one or two ways in and out. Great if you enjoy waiting forty minutes to go five miles on a normal Tuesday, terrible if you actually want to spend time doing something you like. Toss in a stalled car, a delivery truck, or (heaven help us) a bit of rain, and the entire system just grinds to a halt.

It’s not just an inconvenience; it’s a structural failure. One accident, one bridge closure, or a weather delay, and suddenly you’re sitting in your car for hours, wondering why no one thought this through.

Johns Island for example Is one of the fastest growing and least accessible islands. A serious fire shut down one of the major bridges connecting the island to the rest of Charleston. That left only one way on and off the island. Going through another part of town that already features backed up traffic. It was a nightmare. My friend, who lived just a few miles from our office, spent almost seven hours trying to get home that day. Seven hours for a drive that normally took twenty minutes. It wasn’t just her either—families, commuters, delivery trucks, everyone was trapped in a massive backup. One bridge closed, and the whole side of the city got paralyzed. It’s crazy when you realize just how fragile everything is when there’s no real backup plan.

And it’s not just Charleston. When I lived in Ohio, I watched a highway maintenance project drag on for twenty years. I lived there for over two decades, and by the time I moved, they still hadn’t finished it. Twenty years of orange barrels, detours, and “Progress Coming Soon” signs that became a local joke. It’s not just the slow speed of work; it’s a lack of real focus. Projects that could change lives get buried under paperwork, budget battles, and endless political infighting. Part of the reason is bureaucracy, part is intentional to keep a contract (and paying jobs) in the area for as long as possible.

It’s frustrating. It’s exhausting. But mostly, it’s fixable. If we actually start paying attention we could move the needle to actual progress sooner rather than later.

Infrastructure doesn’t magically appear. It’s planned, funded, and prioritized by the people we elect. If we only show up to vote every four years for president, we’re missing the elections that actually shape our daily lives. Roads. Bridges. Transit options. Parks. Education. These are local and state issues decided at local meetings, in local elections, with local and state funding.

Want your city to have more and better options ten years from now?
Want it to take less than seven hours to drive across town after an emergency?
Want parks, schools, bus routes, and sidewalks that make sense?
We have to care today.

When I first moved to Charleston seven years ago, I should’ve gotten involved. This was going to be a potential forever home for me. I should’ve shown up to council meetings. I should’ve asked questions. Should’ve voted with infrastructure and our city’s future in mind. But life gets busy. I figured all of that stuff would be taken care of by the adults right. Oh shoot, I am one of the adults now. It is my job to give a damn. It’s easy to assume that someone else is handling it because that’s how its always been. Spoiler alert: they aren’t. The game now is to take care of yourself, everyone else be damned.

The best time to fight for better infrastructure in Charleston for me was seven years ago.
The second-best time? Right now.

So what can we do?

Show up.
Ask questions.
Attend as many city council and town halls (unless you’re a coward to face your constituents like Nancy Mace) as you can.
Vote in the elections that feel too small to matter—because they’re the ones that actually do.
Put people in power who think long-term, who care about building sustainable futures, not just maximizing profits over the next fiscal quarter.
Make a list. Like you would when you were a kid, dreaming up a backyard fort or a treehouse.
What do you want your city to look like one year from now? Five? Ten?
Now realize—if you’re not working to make that happen today, it won’t be there tomorrow.

If we don’t start planning and fighting for what we want now, it’s not going to magically appear later.

We’ll just be sitting in our cars, staring at another sea of brake lights, wondering why nobody fixed it.

One vote at a time,
K