Drive Spears Creek Church Road on a weekday evening and you'll notice two things happening at once. A new sign is probably up somewhere between Two Notch and Earth Road. And you're probably sitting still, unable to turn left.
That second part isn't a coincidence or bad luck. Between 7 and 9 in the morning and 4 and 6 in the evening, the South Carolina Department of Transportation restricts left turns at the Spears Creek Church Road and I-20 intersection, a fix put in place because the road simply can't absorb the traffic it was never built for. Meanwhile, the retail buildout along that same corridor has kept adding names, one after another, for going on three years. If you live in Elgin, you've watched both trends unfold at the same time, and the gap between them is the actual story of this stretch of road right now.
What's opened since your last drive down this way
The corridor's newest addition is Carolina Fish & Wings, which opened this summer at 565 Spears Creek Church Road, Suite F, run by owners Karen and Shola Erinfolami. It's tucked into Spears Creek Plaza, the 8,450-square-foot retail building that signed its first tenant back in early 2024 and still has roughly 2,600 square feet available for lease, according to current commercial listings. That's worth knowing if you've been wondering what else might land in that plaza next.
A few other additions and near-additions worth tracking:
- Publix, the anchor of the Market at Spears Creek at 185 Earth Road, opened April 30, 2025, bringing 46,791 square feet of grocery space and about 140 jobs to the corridor. It's now been open long enough that most residents have stopped calling it "the new Publix," but it's still the newest full-size grocer in the immediate area.
- Wingstop was approved for a spot in that same Earth Road complex, with construction permits valued at $430,000, making it the sixth Wingstop location in the greater Columbia market.
- Firehouse Subs got the green light for 572 Spears Creek Church Road, the corridor's 11th location for the chain in the Columbia area, alongside a Valvoline Quick Oil Change going in nearby.
- Parker's Kitchen was approved for the Spears Creek Church and Earth Road intersection, the first location in the area for a convenience and food chain that's been operating since 1976 and is planning roughly 15 more sites across Columbia, Richland County, and Lexington in the coming years.
- Taco Bell, a QuikTrip, and Scoop of Heaven Homemade Ice Cream have all opened along the same stretch over the past couple of years, filling in what used to be open lots between Two Notch and Earth Road.
None of this happened quietly. It happened in the span of roughly two years, on a road that was already carrying more traffic than it was designed for before any of these businesses broke ground.
Why the road didn't get here first
Richland County has known this stretch needed more lanes since at least 2021, when the Transportation Penny Tax program held its first public input sessions on widening the road. The county's own 20-year traffic projections showed the corridor sliding toward a "failing" level of service, and current counts put daily traffic at around 12,000 vehicles, which is the number that eventually forced SCDOT to add the peak-hour left-turn restriction at I-20 as a stopgap.
The widening plan itself is straightforward on paper. From Two Notch Road to Earth Road, the road grows from two lanes to three. From Earth Road to Jacobs Mill Pond Road, it grows to five lanes with a center median for left turns, covering about 2.3 miles in total, funded through a $29 million allocation from the county's Penny Tax program.
Where it gets less straightforward is the timeline, which has slipped more than once. Design and right-of-way work were originally expected to wrap by fall 2023, with construction to follow right after. By early 2024, county officials were telling reporters the project wouldn't actually begin until early 2026. The most recent public progress report, published by the county's Transportation Penny Tax office last summer, showed the project had only just submitted final construction documents to SCDOT and was still penciled in to go out to bid around June or July of this year, with construction now targeted to start near the end of 2026. The county's stated completion date for the whole project is January 2029, nearly eight years after the first public meeting on it.
So while Publix, Firehouse Subs, Wingstop, Parker's Kitchen, and now Carolina Fish & Wings have all managed to go from announcement to open doors in a year or two, the road connecting them to the rest of the corridor has been in some phase of "not yet" since before most of those businesses existed.
What that actually means if you live here
Practically, it means the traffic pattern you've adjusted to over the past year or two isn't changing anytime soon. If you're planning a run to Publix or a stop at Carolina Fish & Wings around 5 p.m., the left-turn restriction at I-20 is still in effect, and it's likely to stay that way through the rest of this year and probably into next, given how far construction has slipped from its original timeline.
It also means the corridor's food and retail options are probably not done growing. With space still open at Spears Creek Plaza and more zoned land nearby, along with the hundreds of new homes and apartments that have been approved in the surrounding area in recent years, there's a reasonable chance another restaurant or two lands here before the road work actually starts moving dirt.
And the corridor's community side is filling in alongside the commercial one. The Que-Munity BBQ Festival and Vendor Market brought a vendor market to Kirkland Circle just this past weekend, one more sign that Elgin's growth isn't only about square footage and construction permits. People are building a life here while the infrastructure catches up.
If there's one thing worth taking from all of this, it's that the corridor's pace of change is genuinely two-speed. Retail and restaurants move fast because private developers control their own timelines. Public infrastructure moves on a different clock, shaped by funding cycles, right-of-way negotiations, and a bidding process that hasn't happened yet as of the county's last update. Knowing that difference doesn't make the left-turn wait any shorter, but it does explain why it feels like Elgin keeps getting more to do while the drive to do it stays exactly as slow as it was two years ago.
If you're weighing what this kind of growth means for property values or timing a move in or out of the area, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these corridors closely. Hannah Norman keeps an eye on how Elgin's development pace connects to the broader Elgin neighborhood market, and Let's connect if you'd like a read on what any of this means for your specific street or subdivision, plus a free home valuation while you're at it.
