Pennies for Progress Funds Much-Needed Road Expansion

The heavily-travelled 5.2-mile corridor between Rock Hill and York, SC received a much-needed upgrade this past fall with Sloan Construction expanding the two-lane highway to four lanes and a center turn lane.

The project included approximately 115,000 cubic yards of earthwork, placement of graded aggregate base course, placement of over 77,000 tons of base, binder and surface asphalt, the construction of over 45,000 linear feet of curb and gutter, the installation of 33,000 linear feet of concrete storm drain pipe and 227 drainage structures.

The project also included the construction of a 140-foot long three span bridge over Fishing Creek, using 45-inch pre-stressed concrete AASHTO Type III beams, 42-inch drilled shafts and steel end-bent H-pilings. Capital Management & Engineering of Rock Hill, SC coordinated utility relocation work for the project, as well as field management for York County.

Pennies for Progress is the name of the York County Capital Projects Sales and User Tax Program. The Pennies for Progress Program was initiated by York County to provide citizens with a safer and more efficient roadway system.

Projects were chosen by a Sales Tax Commission representing citizens, and then were approved by voters. York County was the first county in South Carolina to pass this type of sales tax to improve the road system, with 99 cents of every sales tax dollar raised in York County staying in York County.

The Pennies for Progress initiative currently has targeted more than $200 million in projects aimed at making the road system in York County safer and more efficient. It is estimated that it will take approximately eight more years to complete construction on the 1997 and 2003 Pennies for Progress road projects.

CME manages the program by overseeing and monitoring the environmental/planning design, right-of-way acquisition and construction-phase services of 34 projects included in the seven-year capital program.

The goal of the $13.9 million Hwy. 161 widening project, for example, was to alleviate congestion and improve safety by providing additional needed road capacity.

Project specifics

The original 24-foot-wide two-lane roadway was constructed of 10-foot-wide concrete travel lanes. The travel lanes had subsequently been widened with an 8-inch hot-mix asphalt overlay. Joseph Fowler, project manager for Sloan, said widening was accomplished by creating two new eastbound lanes and half of the center turn lane.

"Generally we would widen a road on both sides, but we were restricted by an adjacent railroad, so we could only expand in one direction," Fowler says. "It actually made it a little easier to construct since we could maintain traffic flow on the existing road while we were building the expansion. In order to expand the width of the roadway from 24-feet wide to 63-feet wide, all of the new 30-foot wide construction work (to accommodate two 12-foot wide travel lanes and half of the center turn lane) took place on one side of the road right-of-way."

Once an 8-inch HMA base layer and a 2-inch binder layer were placed, traffic was then rerouted on the new travel lanes and work on the existing travel lanes began.

"We then milled two inches off the old asphalt overlay of the existing road, replaced it with a 2-inch binder course before covering the entire width of the five-lane roadway with a 2-inch surface course," Fowler explains.Sloan produced (at its Blacksburg, SC plant) and placed a standard South Carolina Superpave mix design - a Type A 25mm base mix, a Type B intermediate/binder 19mm mix, a Type B 9.5 mm surface mix; along with several other mix designs used for patching and leveling. All mixes were produced with approximately 5% PG 64-22 asphalt cement binder, and all were produced with South Carolina's allowed reclaimed asphalt pavement content - 30% in the base, 15% in the intermediate and 15% in the surface mix designs.