SAFE STREETS BURLINGTON--WHO WE ARE

Champlain Parkway:  Stop!  Re-Evaluate!  Re-Imagine!
    
Burlington residents committed to supporting highest quality and safest walking, bicycling and car facilities for all who live in and visit Vermont's most popular urban destination. 

Like the famous Church Street Marketplace with the highest level of safety of any street and all of its intersections in Vermont, the principles of safe busy streets do not stray from separate walk, bicycle, and vehicle facilities, or shared space approaches to urban transportation design.  

Church Street Marketplace Early in the Morning

The three principal ingredients for safe streets:

1.  Sidewalks--sidewalks bring the safest environment for walking, cutting accident rates about 90% for the walking mode over streets without sidewalks. 

2.  Cycle track--protected bike lanes--along street sections afford for bicyclists of all abilities and ages safe conditions.  Cycle track on busy streets is the newest and most popular street component since the advent of the sidewalk. 

3.  Modern roundabouts in single lane configuration also reduce all-modes serious and fatal injuries by about 90%.  The roundabout is the "sidewalk" of the intersection, the "intersection safety belt for all modes", and outshines a traffic signals in all respects, such as, capacity to move traffic, reduction of gasoline use and pollutants, and delay for all users. 

A completely "safe street" with moderate to high levels of traffic features sidewalks and cycle track along street sections along with roundabouts at major intersections. 


Champlain Parkway:  Stop!  Re-Evaluate!  Re-Imagine!

The Roundabout

The roundabout in single lane format cuts pedestrian, car occupant and bike serious and fatal injuries by about 90%.  With 3,500 roundabouts in U.S. and Canada, built since 1990, not one pedestrian fatality through June 2015 -- 25 years Burlington!  Burlington has 75 signalized intersections and there have been two pedestrian fatalities in 18 years!  

Montpelier's Keck Cirlce (Spring and Main Streets) 1st U.S. Roundabout
East of Colorado, North of Maryland--1995

Roundabouts also calm speeds outward along each approach one to two blocks. 

Cycle Track (protected bike lanes)

Only about one in ten able to bike do so on busy streets as they feel unsafe and not without reason.  Cycle track, a new approach and immediately popular, puts a barrier, like a curb, flexible posts or other treatment to separate bicycles from vehicle streams.  Cycle track passes the "popsicle test" for young children, is termed "family friendly" and offers higher safety than ordinary bike lanes found in practically all cases today. 



Cycle track demonstration fall 2015 on North Union Street