"It's here now. We definitely need it."
That was Richland County Council Chairwoman Jesica Mackey, quoted by The Post and Courier as she described the case for widening Spears Creek Church Road back when the design phase had just wrapped. She was right about the need. Businesses continue to open along the road while the widening project advances through its own timeline.
If you drive this stretch between Two Notch Road and I-20 on any given week, you've probably clocked a new sign, a new drive-thru, a new construction fence. The retail openings and road-project milestones along this stretch have followed different timelines.
The Corner That Finally Filled
The anchor everyone waited on arrived on April 30, 2025: a 47,000-square-foot Publix at 185 Earth Road, right at the intersection with Spears Creek Church Road, staffed with about 140 employees. It took a while to get there. Publix first announced the location back in 2022 with an early-2024 opening target, then pushed it to late 2024 or early 2025 before finally cutting the ribbon that April.
The shopping center around it, called the Market at Spears Creek, was designed to hold more than groceries. A Wingstop was permitted for one of the plaza's eight commercial suites, and Parker's Kitchen, the Georgia-based convenience chain expanding into the Midlands, got zoning approval in March 2025 for a location at the same Earth Road and Spears Creek Church Road corner. Neither had a confirmed opening date in the public record as of this writing, which is its own small data point about how retail timelines here run faster on some fronts than others.
Two miles up the road, the newest name on the corridor is Carolina Fish & Wings, which opened this past June at 565 Spears Creek Church Road, Suite F, a Southern-style seafood and wings spot run by owners Karen and Shola Erinfolami. That address sits inside Spears Creek Plaza, an 8,450-square-foot retail strip that signed its first tenant in 2024 and has been leasing space at $35 a square foot ever since, a sign of how quickly what was empty land a few years ago turned into leasable frontage.
A Timeline That Doesn't Line Up
Lay the business openings next to the road project's own milestones and the mismatch is hard to miss.
| Date | Corridor Milestone |
|---|---|
| Sept. 2021 | Richland County holds public input session on widening plans |
| Jan. 2022 | County targets a winter 2024 construction start, winter 2027 completion |
| Jan. 2025 | City board waives a sidewalk requirement for a new Spears Creek Road commercial site because DOT is expected to tear it up anyway |
| Jan. 2026 | DOT materials list this as the construction start month, per city zoning documents |
| April 2025 | Publix opens at Market at Spears Creek |
| June 2026 | Carolina Fish & Wings opens at Spears Creek Plaza |
| Sept. 2026 | County reports roughly one-third of the widening's right-of-way easements secured, with condemnation notices still working through several parcels |
The road project has moved its own start date at least twice since 2022. Retail openings have continued along the corridor during that period.
The Sidewalk Nobody Built
At 572 Spears Creek Church Road, a Firehouse Subs and a Valvoline Quick Oil Change got the green light within the same city meeting in early January 2025. The developer, Mike Ziegler, asked the Board of Zoning Appeals to waive the requirement to build a sidewalk in front of the property. His reasoning was blunt: the state was going to widen the road and rip out any sidewalk he built anyway, so why spend the money. The board agreed and granted the variance.
The timeline for that widening, however, remained uncertain. Nine months later, the county's own transportation staff were telling committee members that only about a third of the necessary land easements for that same widening had been secured, with condemnation proceedings still working through the rest and full land acquisition not expected until late winter.
Commercial listings for the corridor put daily traffic at around 11,100 vehicles passing Spears Creek Plaza alone, a number that predates whatever the Publix and Carolina Fish & Wings openings have added since. Back in 2023, SCDOT had already restricted left turns at the Spears Creek Church Road and I-20 interchange during the 7 to 9 a.m. window, a traffic measure introduced while the widening project remained in planning.
What's Still Filling In
The corridor isn't close to finished filling out. A townhome community of roughly 310 units has been under construction near Cornelia Street and Jacobs Mill Pond Road, adding to the hundreds of homes already built or underway along this stretch. Between the interstate and Two Notch Road, existing anchors like QuikTrip, Taco Bell, and Scoop of Heaven Homemade Ice Cream have been joined by newer additions that keep the retail mix churning even as the through-lanes stay the same width they've been for years.
The widening itself is designed in two pieces: three lanes from Two Notch Road to Earth Road, and five lanes from Earth Road out to Jacobs Mill Pond Road, with a median built in for left turns. The Richland County Transportation Department's project page still lists it as a live project, just one that hasn't cleared the land-acquisition stage that has to happen before pavement gets touched.
None of this means the corridor is stuck. It means the corridor is doing two different things on two different clocks. Retail openings have continued while the widening project remains in the land-acquisition stage.
If you're weighing what a stretch of road like this actually means for a home nearby, whether the traffic pattern, the retail pace, or the pending infrastructure changes something for your specific situation, reach out to Alivia Cavanaugh at ACAVREALESTATE.com. She tracks corridors like Spears Creek Church Road block by block, not just on the map.
