When South Carolina Department of Transportation Secretary Justin Powell spoke to Midlands locals at the Lexington Chamber and Visitors Center Business Over Lunch event on Sept. 29, he provided updates on statewide roads and bridges projects, many of which impact Lexington County drivers and the local economy.

Now a Town of Lexington resident, Powell told locals that a major takeaway from his talk is that SCDOT is catching up with 30 years of deferred maintenance on the state roads system, thanks to the 2017 bill passed by the S.C. General Assembly.

“To raise additional money to improve the state’s existing roads and bridges, the S.C. General Assembly passed Act 40, which took effect in July 2017. The law increases the state’s gasoline tax by 12 cents per gallon over six years (two cents per year) and imposes a variety of fee increases on vehicles,” according to the state’s website. “Act 40 cited the deteriorated condition of our state’s existing roads and bridges to justify increasing taxes by $625 million a year, and it limited using these increased tax collections for repairing, maintaining, and improving those deteriorated roads and bridges.”

The infrastructure challenges South Carolina was facing in 2017, however, are different from the challenges the state is facing today because of population booms.

“But I think we all know this, particularly in places like Lexington County, Horry County, Greenville County, York County, is that South Carolina is not the same South Carolina that we had back in 2017,” Powell said. “We focused on four key pillars of investment for the Department of Transportation.”

The four pillars he outlined included rural road safety, paving, bridges and interstates.

Rural road safety

Powell said South Carolina is home to the nation’s worst rural road fatality rate.

“There are ways we can engineer roads to make them more safe,” he said. “Adding wider shoulders, rumble strips, better signage and marking.”

The department has a goal of completing 1,300 miles of rural road projects by 2027, and currently has 1,200 miles of rural road projects underway. Powell also noted that data show a 20% decrease in rural road fatalities; traffic engineers gather this data through a three-year period before a project and a three-year period after a project is completed.

According to May 2025 reporting from the Chronicle, there are over 2,800 miles of publicly maintained roads in Lexington County. 1,555 miles of those are state-maintained, while 1,298 miles of those are county-maintained. And the town of Lexington maintains some of its own roads, too. 700.13 miles of the roads in the county are paved, while 598.23 miles of them are dirt.

Paving

South Carolina has a 41,000-mile-long state highway system, Powell said, adding that it’s actually the country’s fourth-largest state highway system.

“Put that in context, the only states that have bigger systems than us are Texas, North Carolina and Virginia,” he said. “Georgia has a 17,000-mile system. Florida has a 12,000-mile system, so we have to maintain an enormous system relative to our size of the state. … We've gotten nearly a quarter of the state highway system under contract for paving, so our conditions are getting better every day.”

Bridges

South Carolina has 8,400 bridges and SCDOT owns 3,400 bridges. 2,400 bridges are at least 60 years old. 431 bridge projects are underway, Powell said, and General Assembly investments recently increased the bridge project’s capacity.

A July 2025 release from SCDOT says the money SCDOT is receiving will help reach the goal of 530 bridge projects in 10 years; the General Assembly allocated $200 million in additional one-time funding for S.C. bridges. The program did have $239 million, so the additional state funding increases the total program for bridge replacements and rehabilitations for the coming year to $439 million.

In Lexington County, one bridge is considered primary according to the plan, and four others are considered secondary. S.C. 12's bridge going over the Congaree River is listed as primary. And bridges crossing over I-26, Lightwood Knot Creek, I-20 and Lick Fork Branch are considered secondary bridges.

Interstates

Powell said interstate improvements are needed to help keep the state’s economy moving forward.

“There’s a tremendous amount of work happening right here in the Midlands,” he said. “The big project that y’all all notice is ‘malfunction junction,’ and we are working to turn it into Carolina Crossroads. … We have completed Phase 1, which was the Bush River Road-Colonial Life interchange. That is complete and open to traffic, and we’re just wrapping up the Broad River Road interchange; that was Phase 2 of the project.

“What you’ll see next and we’re already under contract for is the widening of I-20 between 378 and Bush River Road; that is Phase 3C of the project, and then Phase 3D, we’re about to initiate, and that is to work on the I-26-I-126 interchange, and we will continue to work through this over the next several years phase by phase.

“When I came to DOT, we had about $2 billion under construction at any time. Today, we have $6.5 billion worth of work. … I don’t think you can get anywhere in the state without running across an orange cone or a work zone.”  

Powell then went on to explain the process state entities must go through to get road work done.  

The SCDOT budget is about 40% funded by the federal government, he said. 

“While we’ve seen a lot of positive things in terms of cutting red tape with this current administration from the prior administration, we still got to work a lot through the federal government,” Powell said, adding that a lot of work must be cleared by the United States Department of Transportation first.  

Additionally, the 46 county transportation committees across the state of South Carolina have a hand in road projects. Those committees, Powell said, get 3.99 cents of the gas tax.  

The Columbia Area Transportation Study (COATS) and the Central Midlands Council of Governments (CMCOG) are other players addressing congestion, currently utilizing the 2045 Long Range Transportation Regional Plan, which is available to view at centralmidlands.org. 

The study area includes all or portions of Richland, Lexington, Fairfield, Newberry, Kershaw and Calhoun counties, according to the website. 

“There’s a lot of hands involved in making projects happen across the state,” Powell said, later adding that he is pushing for the federal government to allow SCDOT to permit its own projects, which would make road work happen a lot faster. 

Moving on to the topic of inflation during the Lexington County event, Powell said that in 2017, SCDOT could buy about 114 miles of two-lane paving with about $36 million, or one penny in the gas tax. During the most recently completed fiscal year, however, SCDOT could buy about 87 miles of two-lane paving for that same amount.  

Experts predict South Carolina will have a million more residents by 2040, Powell said, later adding that another reason on top of inflation as to why the gas tax doesn’t go as far as it used to is because more drivers are opting for electric cars, which don’t contribute to the gas tax. 

“SCDOT has not been sitting on its hands with this issue,” he said. “First, we got to continue system recovery. We got to continue to invest in our bridges. We’ve got to continue to invest in pavements and safety.”  

Mentioning a planned expansion by the Port of Charleston to increase its capacity from moving 2.5 million containers annually to 10 million containers annually, Powell said that will place a lot of stress on South Carolina’s interstate system and populous areas, like Lexington County.  

“We've got a real challenge that if we're going to maintain this economic engine that we have across the state right now, we've got to work on moving our urban areas better,” he said. “And that means looking at things that we haven’t always looked at; it's maybe not always adding more lanes, it's retiming signals. It's improving intersections, looking at things like trains that we can move people to where they need to go.” 

While the state’s populous areas continue to grow, South Carolina’s rural areas are shrinking, Powell said, meaning that road infrastructure must serve rural citizens, ensuring road access to healthcare, jobs and more.  

The state House of Representatives has convened an ad hoc committee to modernize the DOT, he added.  

“As South Carolina continues to grow, it is critical that our infrastructure keeps pace,” State Speaker of the House Murrell Smith, R-Sumter, said in a May 2025 release. “This committee will take a comprehensive look at how SCDOT can better serve the needs of our citizens—today and in the future. From innovation and technology to organizational structure and long-term planning, no idea is off the table.” 

Committee hearings have happened all over the state, including in Columbia, Greenville, Myrtle Beach and Beaufort, as well as one planned for Sumter.