Mount Pleasant resident Christine Messick has spent more than four decades watching the Charleston area grow, and this month she decided to turn her own frustration behind the wheel into data. Messick launched an informal online survey last week asking fellow Lowcountry drivers how worsening road congestion is reshaping their daily routines, and the response caught her off guard.
More than 150 people had filled out the questionnaire within days, describing missed school pickups, late arrivals at work and, in some cases, anxious drives to reach relatives in the hospital. Messick said she plans to keep the survey open for another week so more voices can weigh in before she compiles the results.
She said she reached out to several elected officials and agency leaders about the region’s traffic troubles but did not hear back, which pushed her to try a grassroots approach instead. Many of the residents who responded work with populations that depend on public transit, and Messick noted that buses get stuck in the same gridlock as everyone else, compounding the strain for people who have no alternative way to get around.
The South Carolina Department of Transportation’s most recent traffic count found that stretches of Interstate 26 in the region now carry more than 170,000 vehicles a day, a figure that underscores how quickly the road network has been outpaced by population growth. Messick hopes the informal data she is gathering can eventually bring residents and local leaders together in person to talk through short-term fixes while longer-range transportation projects work their way through planning.
For now, she is treating the survey less as a formal study and more as a way to give shape to a shared frustration that many Lowcountry commuters had assumed was theirs alone.