Already one of the worst traffic nightmares in the Upstate, Greenville County stands poised to approve another 360 residences at the intersection with Butler Road. People complain about the traffic, yet development on Woodruff Road continues its unrestrained acceleration. Why does the county do this to the people? Easy: MONEY. All our local government cares about here in Greenville is tax revenue. More development means more money: money that can be spent giving their cousins, siblings, and friends lucrative contracts. Money for embezzlement and other personal projects. Who cares about the citizens? The freaking county council - Jonsers included - know that they will get re-elected. Heck - if they blew up the county, they’d still get re-elected. I do, however, have the solution to the traffic problems in Greenville County.

First some background. Property owners should have the right to do what they want with their property. So I am not necessarily against development. The problem is that with development come profits. Developers theoretically are interested in making money - right? That’s nice. I’m all for people earning money. But look at the rest of the picture: the impact a company’s profit making has on people who are un-related to that profit.

People - taxpayers - drive on Woodruff Road. They drive on Roper Mountain Road where another subdivision is going in near Blacks Rd. These taxpayers have a vested interest in the road because they have paid for it. Has the developer from Wisconsin paid for the road? NO. They come in here, build, make money, then leave. They leave behind hundreds of more vehicles to use the same road that was present before those vehicles came. Drivers on that road therefore are forced to use their time and emotional health trying to navigate the same roads that have become over-congested as a result of someone else’s profit.

Why do people have to suffer because someone else wants to make money? I don’t think it’s right. The developers are never held accountable to compensate citizens for the wasting of their lives. This is not right.

The solution then becomes apparent: a developer must pay for the expansion of the roads that they impact. Before they build, they buy land for the buildings AND they buy land to expand the road to handle the additional capacity. That cost is then passed on to the customers through higher sale prices of their subdivided lots.

Traffic is out of control in Greenville. If development is to continue, developers must be REQUIRED to make sure that the surrounding roads are upgraded to absorb the impact of the developer’s profit-making venture.

Read more about this HERE.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 1:30 pm and is filed under News - South Carolina. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.