This episode of Simple Civics: Greenville County is brought to you by Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, providing free books to children zero to five throughout Greenville County. To sign up, visit greenvillefirststeps.org/freebooks.
Ever wondered why some potholes get fixed in days while others linger for months? In this episode, we sit down with Summer and Bennett Meares from Bike Walk Greenville to demystify road ownership in Greenville County. They share how their volunteer "Geek Squad" created a user-friendly tool to help residents navigate the confusing patchwork of state, county, and city-owned streets so that your concerns actually reach the right people.
The Meares explain why South Carolina has one of the largest state-owned systems in the country and how that history impacts your daily commute. You’ll hear real-world success stories of reporting potholes and broken sidewalks using the tool, along with tips for submitting effective maintenance requests through Greenville County GIS and municipal portals like Greenville Cares. They also discuss how this data helps advocacy groups identify safety "hotspots" to improve infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians alike.
If you are tired of bouncing between government agencies or simply want to see your neighborhood improved, this episode is for you. Learn how to become a more effective advocate for your community by using public data to get tangible results. Tune in to discover how a little civic engagement - and the right map - can lead to smoother, safer streets for everyone in the Upstate.
Episode Resources
Introduction: Who Owns Your Street?
Katy Smith: Who owns your street and why does it matter? You might think the answer should be straightforward, but for too long, this has been a topic of confusion for residents and even for those folks who work for local and state government.
But now we have a new tool to make it so much easier to know which government owns which road and how to report a needed repair or improvement. I'm Katy Smith with Greater Good Greenville, and on this episode of Simple Civics Greenville County, we talk with Bike Walk Greenville about their new tool, Who Owns the Roads?, that lets you enter a street or search it on a map and make reports to your governments about what you're seeing.
Joining me are Summer and Bennett Meares, members of the data analytics team for Bike Walk Greenville, a group of volunteers who call themselves the Geek Squad. On their own time, these volunteers have created this amazing resource for all of us to use.
Bennett is a data engineer and Summer's background is in marketing and writing, and they are both bike commuters who are out on the roads and trails every day. In the episode, we mentioned many online resources and all of them will be linked in the show notes. I'm so pleased to be joined by two members of the data analytics team for Bike Walk Greenville, Summer and Bennett Meares. Thanks so much for being here today.
Summer Meares: Thank you for having us.
Bennett Meares: Glad to be here, Katy.
The Importance of Knowing Road Ownership
Katy Smith: Let's start at the very most basic. Why is it important that someone would know who owns a road?
Summer Meares: We decided to do this Who Owns the Roads? project as our first big project for Geek Squad, which is what we affectionately call the data analytics team, because road ownership is really foundational to the work of Bike Walk Greenville.
We often get the question of why roads are the way they are, and the answer often comes down to who owns the road. When we're looking at a project that might involve widening a sidewalk, adding a bike lane, or looking at an extension of the Swamp Rabbit Trail that crosses over different roads, the first thing you need to know is who owns that road.
Road ownership also impacts storm debris collection. For example, after Hurricane Helene last year, some people had the debris on their streets collected within a week after the storm, whereas their neighbors one or two streets over had the debris sitting on the road for a couple of months.
Road ownership also impacts salting and plowing during the ice and snow events that we had recently. It also impacts how you make a maintenance request when you want to report something like a pothole in the road, debris in the bike lane, or a broken sidewalk.
If you're in the city of Greenville, for example, you can report pretty much any road within the city to the city of Greenville, but it may not be the correct department to talk to. They can forward on your request, but that's not the most effective or efficient way to make your concerns known.
We want to make that information more accessible through this project so that you can report your concerns directly to the people who have the power to address them. This means you're submitting your maintenance requests to the people who actually own and maintain the road that you're on. That would be either SCDOT, Greenville County, or one of the six cities in our county.
The History of South Carolina’s Complex Road System
Katy Smith: I think most people would think, "I live in the city, so why aren't all the roads city roads?" Why is this complicated? Who are the different parties that own the roads and the boundaries? You touched on it, Summer, but maybe, Bennett, you could elaborate.
Bennett Meares: You would think so, but this is the product of some long, complicated history. South Carolina is a patchwork of different road owners and stakeholders. Summer, do you want to touch on the history of how we got to this point?
Summer Meares: Greenville County is really a patchwork of different road owners. Generally speaking, most county roads are located in the unincorporated areas of the county, while city roads will fall within those city boundaries.
For example, in the city of Greer, roads are going to fall within that boundary, but that doesn't mean that all the roads within the city of Greer are owned by the city. A lot of the roads throughout our county are actually state roads that are owned and maintained by SCDOT.
The reason for that goes back to the 1920s, when the federal government passed several different acts that would support highway building across our country, and they made that funding available to states.
South Carolina is historically a more rural agricultural economy, and a lot of smaller communities could not afford to pave their own roads. The representatives actually advocated for the state taking ownership of their roads so they could be paved.
That's how we got the highway system and the road network we have now in South Carolina. That may have worked back then to bolster the economies of those smaller areas, but now it presents more challenges.
South Carolina actually has the fourth largest state-owned road system in the country, which is really remarkable because we're nowhere near fourth in terms of population or geographic area. We have a very long list of state roads that SCDOT is responsible for maintaining, and that includes within our municipal boundaries and within Greenville County.
Bennett Meares: When we were giving our talks in previous presentations, I'll usually pick a few roads that I know are interesting case studies. Vardry Street is one that I keep in my back pocket. A lot of times, roads change ownership halfway through.
When we were doing a walk audit with Upstate Forever about a year or so ago, we were walking on West McBee going towards District West. There was a broken sidewalk. This was before we officially launched Who Owns the Roads?, but it was pretty late in development.
We snapped a picture, we talked about it, and then I submitted the request. When I was checking on it a day or two later—because at the time I submitted it, it was SCDOT—it had switched underneath me.
Katy Smith: Oh my gosh.
Bennett Meares: I think that was the last possible ticket for that road to SCDOT. We actually highlighted this on the page. Within three days—which I want to point out is lightning fast in terms of government—that sidewalk was paved and repaired.
Just a few days ago, I did the same route with Upstate Forever. We pointed out the sidewalk as a tangible example of citizen action making a difference.
Overcoming the Barriers to Reporting Issues
Katy Smith: That's great. I love it. You guys are making it easy now. Why has this previously been so hard to answer, and before this tool, how would people go about handling things?
Bennett Meares: You shouldn't have to take a crash course in local civics to know who to call to report an issue. Previously, citizens bounced around. We've heard many anecdotes of people getting frustrated and giving up on the process.
Response times between the state, the county, or the city can vary wildly. All of the information we have here is publicly available, but we've gathered and consolidated it to lower that barrier to entry as much as possible.
There are the train lines, parks, voting districts, and water stuff. Everything is on Greenville County GIS, and we wanted a one-stop solution on your phone for the whole county. Click a button, make a submission.
Summer Meares: We've distilled that information available through Greenville County GIS and really simplified it. We turned it into a user-friendly tool on our webpage just to make it easy for people.
How to Use the Interactive Road Map and Search Tool
Katy Smith: Okay, well, let's get into it a little bit. Where does it live? How does it work? What should someone do?
Summer Meares: This project is available at bikewalkgreenville.org/roads or at bwgvl.org/roads. We have some information on the background of road ownership, as well as our map and search tool.
Bennett Meares: I have to give credit where credit is due. Summer did most of the writing and the research, as well as our other volunteers, researching the advocacy side of things.
My role primarily was on the two embeds: the interactive map of every road in the county and the interactive search tool directly underneath.
Summer Meares: We have the state, county, municipal, and private roads all different colors on the map. I should mention that there are a small number of private roads in our county in addition to roads owned by government entities.
We also have the different municipalities color-coded on the map. You can easily move around the map and look at your area to figure out who owns the roads near you.
Through the search tool, you can look up a road name. It doesn't work for specific addresses, but if you know the road name, you can find that and it will show it on the map and pop up the road ownership information as well as the links for how you can report a maintenance request.
Katy Smith: I am sitting here with my laptop and I've gone to bikewalkgreenville.org/roads. Let me tell you what I'm seeing so I can preview it for you. At the top, I see a map of Greenville and I can move my cursor around, and the little finger will highlight every single road that it crosses over and who owns it.
There's a little location arrow in the lower right, just like you might see on your iPhone when you're looking for a restaurant or a coffee shop. I can click on that and it zooms right in where I am sitting.
That makes it really easy for me to just scroll around and say, "Oh, look, this road is SCDOT owned. This road is city owned," and see what's going on exactly where I am.
Then I can also scroll down below and enter in the road name—not the address specifically, as Bennett said—but I can put in the street that we are on. It pulls it up a different way and gives me a view. This tool is amazing, both for looking up specific places that we are or just poking around and better understanding our communities.
Bennett Meares: I want to highlight that this map and search tool is pulled directly from Greenville County GIS and is updated regularly. This is not some static snapshot in time. This is the current state of things.
Summer Meares: We have had a few situations where people thought road ownership was different than what is shown on the map. If you think something is incorrect or maybe there's even a disputed road ownership, you can reach out to us and we'll look into it and update it on our map.
The Technical Process: Under the Hood of the Map
Katy Smith: Okay, now let's do a little bit of nerdy looking under the hood. How did you do this? You said this would be much better if it had a better interface and then some kind of data stuff happened. What did you do?
Bennett Meares: Without getting too technical, I'm a data engineer and I maintain a data engineering framework called Meerschaum, at meerschaum.io. I think about this every day. I think of everything in terms of data pipelines.
We have a post-GIS database, which is pretty much the standard in the GIS world. We have several layers of cleaning, transformation, caching, and all that fun stuff so that the final product is this nice, clean, refined resource. If you open the hood, the raw data is definitely messy.
However, to give credit where credit is due, Greenville County GIS has done a remarkable job clearly delineating every road in Greenville County. We've only had to do minor touch-ups here and there.
Community Response and Impact
Katy Smith: That's great. As someone who's not at all technical but knows when something's working for me or not, I appreciate all that technical savvy you brought to it to make it a usable tool. What kind of feedback have you received since it's been out?
Bennett Meares: We've presented it at several neighborhood association meetings. We brought this up at the Haynie-Sirrine neighborhood meeting, and some people were surprised. Tyndall Avenue, for example, the residents there were sure that it was a city road, but surprised it was a state road. You wouldn't think that. It looks like any other street.
There's this YouTube video by Road Guy Rob about the Swamp Rabbit Trail Network, specifically about how it's a transportation corridor, not just a recreational amenity. The Bike Walk Greenville data analytics team got a bit of a shout out.
We've also included the Swamp Rabbit Trail Network as a road because it's a transportation corridor, just as any other road is. You can look on our search tool right now for the Swamp Rabbit Trail. Like any other road network, it has several different stakeholders.
Summer Meares: I'll add to that. We've gotten some great feedback from neighborhood associations and from peer organizations. We recently presented at the LiveWell Greenville Active Living Coalition and got some great feedback from that group of people who are involved in transportation advocacy in Greenville County.
We've also heard that staff in Travelers Rest have bookmarked this tool and are using it frequently. We've gotten some great feedback from them.
Katy Smith: That is so fantastic. That Road Guy Rob video is great. That's one of the many things we'll be putting in the show notes so you all can look things up. It's an outstanding video and it'll make you proud that you live here.
How to Effectively Report Maintenance Issues
Summer Meares: On our page, we have compiled all the information you need to submit a maintenance request to different road owners. Right at the top of the page, there's a purple "Report an Issue" button. If you click on that, it will drop you down to the section where we have all this information.
When you are wanting to submit a maintenance request, the first thing you need to do if you're walking and biking is take a photo. If you're driving, please do not use your phone, but mentally know where you are and get the road name or any landmarks nearby to help work crews locate the issue.
Then you'll want to use our map or our search tool to confirm road ownership, and that will tell you who you need to report the issue to. For SCDOT, they have the 855-GO-SCDOT number, which is the Pothole Blitz hotline for across the state, and they also have a phone number for their upstate office.
You can call either of those numbers to make a report over the phone, and they make it really easy for you to do that. Just make sure that you're as descriptive as possible about the location. They also have an online form, and we've linked to that on our webpage.
For Greenville County, you can call their Department of Public Works or report an issue through their online form. For each of the municipalities, we have the same thing. You can email them a photo and a description of the issue or call their Public Works Department.
The city of Greenville also has a really cool opportunity where you can text Greenville Cares. Bennett and I live within the city of Greenville, and we do this often when we're out walking or biking. We'll pull over and take a photo. They make it really easy to send in those requests.
As members of the community, we are the boots on the ground or the tires on the road who are interacting with our transportation system every day. We're often the first ones who notice things that need repairing.
We can really help out our local government staff by submitting these reports, and this will help them identify areas that need attention. It can also help them identify hotspots where issues might be recurring.
Bennett Meares: And don't be discouraged if your request is not immediately attended to. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, if you will.
Summer Meares: We can't promise that if you make a request, your issue will be addressed, but we do know that the more people that report a maintenance request, the more likely it is to be addressed because it's getting more attention.
We also want to show that as a community, a well-maintained transportation system is important to us. This is just a really easy way to get civically engaged in your community.
Opportunities for Civic Engagement and Volunteering
Katy Smith: Thank you so much for making that point because that's honestly what the podcast is all about. It's civic engagement and our government is here to serve us.
But they cannot be the eyes and ears and tires on every single inch of roadway, which you've already said is a lot in Greenville County. I think they welcome this opportunity to better know how to serve us by engaging the public.
Thank you for making it easy. Some people are probably listening and thinking this is the kind of organization I would love to be more involved with. Of course, you do so much more than the data crunching, but the data is obviously important. How can someone get involved in Bike Walk Greenville?
Bennett Meares: There's lots of ways to get involved, whether it's our bike valets or other programs. Specifically with our data analytics team or the Geek Squad, I just want to put it out there: you do not have to be a geek to join Geek Squad.
We need storytellers and writers and social media people, video editors, artists—you name it. We're always looking for helping hands.
Summer Meares: If you go on Bike Walk Greenville's website, there's a banner right at the top where you can sign up for our email newsletter that will have information about events that you can participate in, like our bike valets or our community roles. You can also follow us on social media for updates.
Bennett Meares: There's a volunteer form that you can submit or you can send an email to data@bikewalkgreenville.org.
Katy Smith: Well, we have done several episodes with Bike Walk Greenville that we can put in the show notes. We've also featured a project of Bike Walk Greenville that was a product of the Geek Squad's work on vulnerable roads in Greenville County and injuries and fatalities that have happened.
Certainly a more somber story than the one we're telling today. But it just shows the power of data and the power of volunteers getting their hands on that data to make it understandable and accessible to residents.
Bennett Meares: That's right, Katy. We have several different series: the Road Ownership Series, the Vulnerable Road Users Series, and some more series in the works to come. I'm encouraging you, if you want to get involved, we have a lot of fun things that we're digging into.
Katy Smith: This is an incredible feature and I cannot thank you both and your volunteer colleagues enough for the abundant time you've put in for this incredible resource that all of us can benefit from. Thanks so much for joining us and for all that you do.
Summer Meares: Thank you for having us.
Bennett Meares: Thank you, Katy.
Credits
Simple Civics: Greenville County is Produced by Podcast Studio X.
A Greater Good Greenville project.
