SAFE STREETS BURLINGTON: City Council Candidate Scores Parkway Design Woes

Thursday, February 9, 2017

City Council Candidate Scores Parkway Design Woes

This week South District (Wards 5&6) candidate Charles Sampson posted the following on Front Porch Forum: "In a recent post to Ward 5 FPF, Councilor Mason provided an update on the City’s plans for the Champlain Parkway. He writes: “Potential changes [connecting Pine Street to Queen City Park Road; roundabouts; separate bike and pedestrian paths] may be considered after the project is complete.” The weakness in the City’s approach to this project is glaring. First, the administration proposes spending $44 million in mixed funding to build a road that fails to meet connectivity and complete streets standards, then suggests that later on the City, on it’s own dime, will make the costly corrections

Costs for mismanaging the Parkway project include forcing South End residents to endure truck traffic for 25 years after the C1 [“road to nowhere”] segment of the roadway was completed from Shelburne to Home while it was, and remains, closed. Second, it includes devoting a 1.6 mile swath of our crucial Enterprise Zone--the key to our future as a high tech creative hub--to a redundant highway from Home to Lakeside. Third, if fails to conserve the Englesby Brook ravine as protected natural area helping preserve our lake water quality, instead bottling it up under the new road. Over $11 million in combined federal, state, and local funds could be saved by canceling C2, the segment from Home to Lakeside, even as we open up that area to job creating, tax paying economic development. The hiatus that the City created by dithering for 25 years is what has led to the use of this publicly-owned right of way as car dealership storage and inefficient surface parking.

When you’re in a hole, you don’t keep digging. The public needs to weigh in on alternative designs for this 1960s limited-access highway that we can’t afford and shouldn’t desire. Vote the public interest on March 7. Charles Simpson, Candidate for Council, South District. '

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Southern Connector Rethinking - Why!

By Steven Goodkind P.E.

The Southern Connector Project is one piece of a larger transportation plan for Chittenden County that was formulated over 40 years ago. It consisted of a network of highways that would encircle the county through Burlington, South Burlington, Williston, Winooski, Essex and Colchester. Parts of it included existing state highways and the interstate. There were also proposed new roads i.e. the Northern and Southern Connectors and the Circumfential Highway.

These proposed new roads share many common characteristics. They were to be for the most part limited access routes that would take traffic from existing local roads and reassign it to these new segments. But just as importantly, they all contained a huge conceptual flaw by relying on the perceived benefits of the ring road concept. .

We have learned a lot in the transportation field in recent decades and it is now widely recognized that it is generally better to improve our existing system to make it safer and more usable to all modes of transportation, than to build new

roads. We have also grown to appreciate the benefits of neighborhood connections that are not separated by manmade barriers such as limited access highways or large development projects. (The Burlington Town Center is an example of the latter case).

As a result, only portions of the original plan have been constructed. They are the three “bypass segments”, including the so-called “road to nowhere” in Burlington. The ring road concept is essentially dead.

However, the old concept does live on in at least one project. The Southern Connector, especially the piece from Home Ave. to Lakeside, is a classic example of old thinking, the benefits of which are far outweighed by the negative aspects it delivers. Because the latest version of this project dumps its supposed

reassigned traffic right back onto Pine Street without a connection to Battery Street, it fails to provide any significant transportation benefit that could not be achieved by simply opening the “road to nowhere”. The current plan eliminates

existing neighborhood connections and removes the connection of Pine St. to Queen City Park Road. A better name for it might be the “Southern Disconnector”. It is a costly and unnecessary relic of the past. This is further compounded by a design for the Pine St segment that is not up to the standards that Burlington has set for “complete streets”. Even our Public Works Director has acknowledged this when he recently said, “if we were designing this project today it would not look like this.”

If we hope to be a 21st century city, we need transportation projects that have designs that reflect 21st century thinking, not 20th century throwbacks.

The Mayor and his associates say they have done their best and it is too late for that. If we don’t proceed, we will have to pay back $7 or 8 million to the federal and/or State governments. This may be a possibility, but making the city payback money for a project that has been significantly changed, (notice I did not say cancelled), is unprecedented in Vermont. Here are some examples:

1) At the last minute the Northern Connector Project was modified to end at Manhattan Drive rather than at Battery and Pearl. This was to avoid destroying a good part of the Old North End.

2) The Circ Highway has been substantially redesigned to use existing routes and much of the originally proposed design will never be used

3) About 25 years ago, governor Dean stopped the construction of the Southern Connector from Home to Lakeside because of the uncertainty that a connection to Battery Street could be built.

4) Even though ROW had been secured and some railroad facilities and the DPW offices in its’ path have been relocated, the Southern Connector route from Lakeside to Battery through the Barge Canal was abandoned.

5) The “road to nowhere” was constructed 30 years ago but never completed and never maintained.

6) In the 1980’s, South Burlington decided not to participate in a segment of the Southern Connector that would have been in their community.

In none of these cases were the communities asked to repay the money they had spent on the project. There has never been and there should never be a penalty for making a project better and/or less expensive. History in this case is clearly

on the side of RETHINKING, REIMAGINING AND REDESIGNING the Southern Connector. It is the smart thing to do! It is not too late!

Thursday, February 9, 2017

City Council Candidate Scores Parkway Design Woes

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