This commentary was written by Ron Krupp of Queen City Park.
For the past two months, a group of residents who live in the Queen City Park neighborhood of South Burlington has been standing at the corner of Pine Street and Queen City Park Road passing out flyers — informing motorists about plans to create a dead-end at the south end of Pine Street to make way for the Champlain Parkway project. This will make it impossible to drive directly from Pine Street to Queen City Park Road.
The drivers that stop and take a flyer — about 2 in 10 — say that they disagree with the “dead-end” plan. If the south end of Pine Street is closed, it would be a major disruption. About a third of the drivers don’t even know about the Champlain Parkway. They ask, “Why hasn’t the Parkway been better publicized?” and “What’s happening to our city?” and “What are the alternatives?” The alternatives are described below.
Blocking the plan to make the south end of Pine Street a dead end in order to clear the way for the Champlain Parkway is just one part in the legal battle that the Pine Street Coalition is waging against the City of Burlington. This fight continues in the courts.
A little bit of history: There has been no significant change in the Parkway design since it was solidified around 2010. The entire project needs to be updated. The Champlain RIGHTway alternative as proposed by the Pine Street Coalition is to place a roundabout where Pine Street meets Queen City Park Road. Other improvements include other roundabouts, wider walkways and bicycle lanes. The Railroad Enterprise Project would relieve congestion from the Maple-King Street neighborhood by cutting over before Curtis Lumber. These improvements would result in less gridlock and a more reasonable solution to some of the many problems described below that the project creates.
The current design of the Champlain Parkway is no longer relevant. It was intended to move traffic from homes in South Burlington, Williston and beyond to jobs in downtown Burlington, at a time — the 1960s — when commuting from the suburbs to downtown offices was the primary mode to urban planning. At the time, Burlington’s South End was filled with warehouses and empty lots to drive through. This carbon-intensive model is no longer relevant to how we live and work.
Today, Burlington’s South End is the most vibrant and rapidly developing section of the city. A limited-access highway cutting the community in two, dead-ending streets and creating noise and safety hazards is a drastically outdated approach.
The environmental justice issues are also critical. It is no longer acceptable to bisect a community with a highway project like the Champlain Parkway that creates noise, pollution, safety and quality of life issues in a low-income neighborhood.
One of the disadvantages to the present Champlain Parkway design is that pedestrians and cars will not be able to access side roads. The present Batchelder and Briggs Street will, under the present project proposal, be built as two-lane roads immediately adjacent to but separate from the limited-access Champlain Parkway. All the neighborhood streets that presently connect to Batchelder and Briggs Streets will be dead-ended.
The Champlain RIGHTway alternatives will improve the Parkway with roundabouts, wider bike lanes and walking paths. The roundabouts would be built at Pine Street and Queen City Park Road, at Kilbourne Street and at the South End Coop.
The Champlain Parkway as planned will create a major traffic bottleneck at Lakeside Avenue and Pine Street. That is the point, according to the present plan, at which traffic from the new two-lane limited access highway gets dumped back onto city streets.
According to the project documents, traffic at the Maple/Pine and King/Pine intersections will dramatically increase traffic; traffic lights at these intersections mean that there will no way to get smooth traffic flow — the result will be more traffic moving faster — more noise, more pollution and significantly more danger to pedestrians and bicyclists in a low-income neighborhood.
It is critical for the public to know that $46 million does not need to be returned to the federal government if the Parkway is not built. The city has been using this money as a major justification for the project. Why does the city keep this information from the public? The public and project decision-makers have repeatedly pointed to the purported pay-back provision as a major reason for voting to proceed with the Parkway, despite the outdated design and environmental justice issues. A major overpass was to be built in Keene, New Hampshire, many years ago, but local opposition changed the design with roundabouts and Keene never had to pay back any money to the feds.
WHAT CAN YOU DO? Sign the Stop the Champlain Parkway Project and Choose the Champlain RIGHTway Petition: http://chng.it/tS9Ts5FjDx
In memory of Tony Redington, Vermont’s most outspoken transportation advocate and the mover and shaker behind The Pine Street Coalition and the Champlain RIGHTway. The work of the Coalition still goes on, and we dedicate the resistance to the present Parkway plan to his memory.