Crestwood Drive Residents Seek Help From City

The quiet, tree-lined street that is Crestwood Drive seems at first glance to be an ideal suburban avenue. The perfect place to come home to after a long day at the office.

That was the intention when the homes were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s. Times have changed since then. To be sure, in relative terms, Crestwood Drive is still a nice place to live. Property values have basically held through the recession and there is no crime to speak of, but some residents feel the road is not only not what it could be and not what it once was.

Doug Massey is one of those people.

Massey is one of the six original homeowners still living on the street. For most of the last 50 years Crestwood Drive was very quiet, he said. However, things changed in the past decade or so, when hundreds, if not thousands, of homes were built off of Ashmore Bridge Road.

Since those homes went up, Crestwood Drive has gradually turned into a connector road. Commuters coming from the north and south on Main Street avoid the intersection at Butler Road and use Crestwood to access Ashmore Bridge Road (see the red highlighted area of accompanying map).

Why use Crestwood Road (green highlighted area of map)? The neighboring streets that might allow quick access to Ashmore Bridge Road have speed bumps (blue highlighted area of maps).

Commuters bypass those and use Crestwood, a street without sidewalks, curbs or a center line. Many commuters traveling southbound on Main Street avoid turning right onto West Butler and continue to Whately Circle and on to Crestwood before turning on to Ashmore Bridge. Other drivers departing the strip malls that house Bi-Lo and Publix use Cary Street to go to Ashmore Bridge Road, rather than go back to West Butler.

Neither Massey nor his neighbor Dan Griffin is upset with the commuters.

“It’s human nature,” Griffin said. “If I was a commuter, I would do the same thing.”

Massey has been trying to get the city to step in and help alleviate the traffic flow for at least the last three years. He pointed out that traffic counts from three years ago showed more than 2,000 cars per day on Crestwood. That number has almost certainly gone up. Then there is the inescapable fact that with increased traffic there are increased instances of speeding, especially considering there are no speed bumps on the road.

Finally, the stop signs where Whately meets the east end of Crestwood are treated by many drivers as a “Yield,” according to Massey. Cars routinely roll through the intersection.

“All I want is to get the residential feel back to the area,” Massey said.

Griffin said has no complaints about how the city services the street.

“If one of us calls about a pothole or a maintenance issue it gets taken care of very quickly,” he said.

Ideally, Massey and Griffin would like to see speed bumps installed. But they know that’s probably not going to happen since the adjoining streets already have them. There was some talk of sidewalks being put in, but that seems to have stalled. If it meant putting in a median with some landscaping, both Massey and Griffin would gladly cede their land in the right of way. But that does not seem likely either.

“If I thought we were in the long range plans I’d feel a little bit better about things,” Griffin said.

Massey understands the importance of growth for Mauldin’s future, but he also believes that one of the things that makes the town so appealing to newcomers is its residential feel.

“We’ve been paying taxes all of our lives to Mauldin and we helped build it,” Massey said. “I think we deserve a little consideration.”

* - Correction: Dan Griffin was misidentified as Dan Carroll in a previous version of this story. We regret the error.