What if there was another bridge across Lake Champlain?
In and around Plattsburgh, New York, the push for a new roadway span to Vermont is growing. A Facebook group dedicated to the cause, formed in 2018, has more than 2,000 members. In recent weeks, local supporters have raised money for a yard sign campaign, with each sign bearing the group’s name and motto, “Bridge the Gap!”
In February, the Plattsburgh Press-Republican penned an editorial calling for a study to look into a new bridge, which it said hasn’t been done since the 1980s.
“Maybe a bridge between Plattsburgh and Vermont is now achievable, structurally and financially,” the newspaper wrote. “At least, it’s worth investigating.”
Today, two bridges span the lake between New York and Vermont: the Rouses Point Bridge, which is less than a mile south of the U.S.-Canada border, and the Lake Champlain Bridge, which connects Addison with Crown Point, New York.
Between them run three Lake Champlain Transportation Co. ferry routes: a half-hour ride between Charlotte and Essex, New York; an hourlong trip between Burlington and Port Kent, New York; and a 15-minute ride between Grand Isle and Plattsburgh.
The Burlington-New York ferry has been shuttered throughout the pandemic, and the ferry company has said it will remain closed for the immediate future.
It’s that northernmost ferry route, linking the Champlain Islands with New York’s North Country, that has drawn the most attention of those seeking to “bridge the gap.”
The ferry transports more than 1 million passengers a year across roughly 2 miles of water, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. On the Vermont side, the ferry docks just off Route 314, about a half-hour drive from downtown Burlington.
Several regular commuters between the Plattsburgh and Burlington areas say they’ve long been frustrated by how much time waiting for and riding the ferry adds to their daily trips, especially in the summer, when tourist traffic on the islands is at its peak.
Crossing the lake by car can require at least an hour detour north around the Rouses Point Bridge, they said, or even longer to travel south and cross at Crown Point.
Commuters who work in health care also say the bridge would provide a more reliable route for staff and patients to move between Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital (the main hospital in Plattsburgh) and Burlington’s University of Vermont Medical Center.
The Plattsburgh hospital is part of the UVM Health Network.
Time and money
One vocal member of the “Bridge the Gap!” group is Ryan Liberty, a radiology clinical instructor at UVM Medical Center, who said he’s taken the ferry to work from his home in Morrisonville, New York, for the past 15 years.
Liberty said he previously lived in Vermont but moved to the Plattsburgh area to help his family care for his sister, who has cancer. He and some of his colleagues at the hospital have been late to work many times due to last-minute changes in the ferry’s schedule, he said, or because they arrived at the dock just as a boat was leaving.
Liberty said he tries to line up his morning routine with the boat schedules, but life with two young children at home sometimes gets in the way.
“If I had a meaner boss, I would have been fired years ago,” he said. “A bridge would be much faster. It would be much more reliable.”
Another Morrisonville resident, Alexandra Paige, commutes to South Burlington three days a week on the ferry and agreed a bridge would simplify her travel both ways.
Paige said she became interested in alternatives to the ferry this past winter, when the Grand Isle-Plattsburgh route was suspended multiple times due to lake conditions — something Lake Champlain Transportation Co. has said had little precedent.
Frustration peaked the morning of Feb. 2, she and other commuters said, when high winds and ice that led the ferry to stop running also caused a tractor-trailer truck to jackknife on the Rouses Point bridge, which temporarily prevented drivers from crossing the lake.
The Press-Republican’s editorial ran a week later, citing that incident as a reason for a renewed look into the possibility of another route across the water.
“It certainly would be a lot easier, faster and cheaper to drive on a bridge at 55 mph than waiting in line for one of three ferries to arrive,” the newspaper wrote at the time.
Lake Champlain Transportation Co. typically operates three ferries on the island route at a time. On weekdays, the company currently runs at least four departures every hour between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m., and between one and three departures an hour overnight.
Paige also said driving across a bridge would likely be cheaper than taking the ferry, which is a key consideration in a region of New York that’s relatively low-income.
Two of the seven counties in the North Country — the top of New York — ranked in the state’s top 10 counties for the percentage of residents living in poverty in 2021, according to data from the New York State Community Action Association.
The number of residents in the region who are unemployed, 4.4%, is lower than the New York average, a March state report shows, though educational attainment also is lower.
The Grand-Isle Plattsburgh ferry currently costs $11.25 for a driver and vehicle, plus a $5 charge per adult passenger and higher rates for larger vehicles. The company also says it may also apply surcharges to account for the high cost of fuel.
Regular Lake Champlain Transportation Co. riders can apply for a “commuter card” that gives them a 30% discount off the regular rates. But for families traveling together, or even solo commuters, the cost of ferry rides adds up, Liberty said.
The commuters VTDigger spoke with also said they’d be willing to pay a toll to drive across a new bridge, perhaps using New York’s E-ZPass billing system.
In response to questions about advocacy for a bridge over the Grand Isle-Plattsburgh ferry route, Heather Stewart, operations manager at Lake Champlain Transportation Co., said in an email: “Our focus is to provide the best possible ferry service 24 hours a day, seven days a week in a challenging world — while supporting the 180 employees in the LCT family.”
Cross-lake health network
Liou Xie, an associate geography and environmental studies professor at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, said the transportation network between greater Plattsburgh and Burlington is important not just for individual jobs, but also access to health care.
Xie, who’s also a member of the “Bridge the Gap!” group, noted the three counties in New York’s northeast corner — Franklin, Essex and Clinton (where Plattsburgh is) — have about six orthopedic surgeons per 100,000 residents combined, while Vermont as a whole has about 14 orthopedic surgeons per as many people.
That figure is about nine per 100,000 residents across New York, she said.
Despite this, David Christensen, an orthopedic surgeon at Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital in Plattsburgh, said he has referred patients to UVM Medical Center, but they refused to go because they could not afford the cost of the ferry.
At the same time, he said, Champlain Valley hospital has difficulty recruiting health care providers (an issue that’s not unique to Plattsburgh, he noted), and believes it would be much easier to attract staff if there was a more direct road link toward Burlington.
Like many of his colleagues, Christensen lives in the Burlington area and rides the ferry.
Xie also said patients in Plattsburgh needing intensive care are sometimes transferred from Champlain Valley hospital to UVM Medical Center, since, unlike UVM, the former does not have a pediatric trauma center and it has a less-capable adult trauma center.
In the most critical cases, patients would be airlifted across the lake, Christensen said, but those services cannot fly in all weather conditions. The alternative is for patients to be transferred in an ambulance, he said, whose most direct route would be the ferry, which also is susceptible to inclement weather.
During the pandemic, Christensen said, Champlain Valley hospital has increased its use of telehealth services, allowing more patients to be treated on-site. But when patients have to be transferred, he said, it seems a new bridge would be the best option.
“There’s few things that are more reliable than ground transport,” he said.
Xie said it makes sense for the Plattsburgh and Burlington regions to share medical services since they’re close together geographically, though a road connection would bolster that link: “from a public health perspective, this region is not integrated,” she said.
UVM Medical Center did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
Stewart, of Lake Champlain Transportation Co., said the company has a longstanding policy of giving ambulances priority to board and disembark from its boats over other vehicles. She declined to say how many ambulances the company transports, adding that, “as a rule we do not give out statistics on ferry customers.”
In response to questions on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s most recent (2020) National Census of Ferry Operators, Lake Champlain Transportation Co. stated from a list of options that it served “commuter transit” trips and “pleasure” trips, but not “emergency” trips.
To Xie, this is further proof the region needs another option across the lake.
Clement Roger, a first responder at AmCare, a St. Albans-based ambulance service, estimated he and his colleagues transport patients between hospitals using the ferry several times a month — though only in situations that are not emergencies.
He said the ambulances pay just as any other vehicle does, and the cost is manageable, in part because they use a commuter card. He noted the ambulances are charged for an additional passenger if they have a patient on board.
Compared to driving north through the Champlain Islands and Rouses Point, Roger said, the cost of the ferry “pretty much evens out” considering the cost of fuel.
Vermont’s view
Xie said that, overall, she has seen much more demand for a bridge from people in New York than people in Vermont, which is likely because more people are looking to travel into the Green Mountain State for jobs and services than into the North Country.
She and other proponents maintain there’s a need for a new crossing, and the issue isn’t whether it would be possible to build a bridge, but that there’s currently little or no political will for the project.
Xie said the lake reaches a depth of about 200 feet under the Grand Isle-Plattsburgh ferry crossing; that’s significantly deeper than under the lake’s other bridge crossings, but is not insurmountable for a modern bridge, she said.
Ann Gammell, the Vermont Agency of Transportation’s chief engineer, said in an email that “while anything is feasible from an engineering perspective,” it would be unlikely that a structure at the crossing would secure the state permits it would need.
Gammell said she could not provide additional information because, to her knowledge, VTrans has never studied the feasibility of building a bridge there.
“Bridge the Gap!” supporters said the project was most recently studied in 1982 by the Army Corps of Engineers, which at the time found a new structure would be too expensive to justify the traffic demand, according to the Press-Republican.
The newspaper said the study also considered a floating tunnel, but that idea “was eliminated because of high winds and a too-soft lake bottom.”
Josie Leavitt, vice chair of the Grand Isle Selectboard, said she was not aware of any real interest in town for building a bridge to Plattsburgh, though she would be open to learning more about commuters’ concerns with the cost of the ferry.
The town’s zoning administrative officer, Scott Brown, also had not come across the idea of a new bridge before, and said he didn’t think it was necessary.
“I’ve taken that ferry a lot over my lifetime,” Brown said. “Honestly, I’ve never found the wait to be an issue. They run the boat so frequently.”
Xie said a new study could help project supporters understand what the environmental impacts of a bridge might be, and how that would compare to any impact of the ferry company’s operations. Importantly, she added, a study also could lay out the cost for the project, which others have said would certainly be in the millions of dollars.
Catherine Davis, president of the Lake Champlain Chamber in Vermont, said she would not expect the state to commit funding to a new bridge between Grand Isle and Plattsburgh, given “the relatively low traffic” in the region, even with the shared health care network across the lake.
She said the chamber hears about the push for a new bridge every few years. It makes more sense for Vermont to upgrade its existing infrastructure first, Davis said, before taking on major new projects such as a third lake crossing.
“I wouldn’t see a new bridge rising to the top of the list in terms of priority,” she said.
New York study requested
Still, Plattsburgh-area residents said they think a more direct roadway connection would encourage travel to and from the Burlington area, and a commute requiring only a car could make it more attractive for Vermont workers to live in New York.
“I would go to Burlington a lot more if there was a bridge — just to go out to eat with my wife,” Liberty said. “And I’m sure people would come to Plattsburgh.”
In recent weeks, “Bridge the Gap!” proponents have seen what could be progress: New York State Assemblyman Billy Jones, D-Chateaugay Lake, filed paperwork asking the state Department of Transportation to consider a feasibility study for the project.
Xie said if New York does take up a study, it will be because a swell of North Country residents have called officials such as Jones (whose office did not respond to VTDigger’s request for comment) and advocated for a new bridge.
Another official in the region — Joshua Kretser, chair of the Clinton County, New York, legislature’s transportation committee — said he’s seen that burgeoning support.
In the North Country, Kretser said, the bridge is “something that I think every regional resident would love to see happen.”