This commentary is by John Raser, M.D., a family doctor and parent who lives and works in St. Johnsbury. He is a clinical assistant professor of family medicine and community health at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, and adjunct assistant professor at UVM Larner College of Medicine.
What do you picture when you hear “rural” Vermont? Here is a picture from the Northeast Kingdom — the most rural corner of the most rural state in the U.S.
In Caledonia County, 16,432 of the 30,324 people live in the five geographically smallest census tracts in St. Johnsbury, Lyndonville and Hardwick.
In four of these tracts, more than 10% of households don’t own a single vehicle. These tracts include more low-income, elderly, and Vermonters of color than more “rural” neighboring tracts.
Caledonia is not alone as a bastion of density in rural Vermont. Every county in the state except Grand Isle includes at least one census tract where over 10% of the households have no vehicle — places like Island Pond, Newport, Bradford, Hartford, Berlin, Morrisville, Windsor, Springfield, St. Albans, Bennington, and many more.
Here in rural Vermont, like everywhere else, taking up space is a luxury.
Why does this matter to me as a community health professional? When we assume everybody outside of Burlington drives, we make life harder and less healthy for many Vermonters.
Here in downtown St. Johnsbury, where about one in six households don’t have a single vehicle, the list of publicly funded services that have been moved out of our walkable center in the past 50 or so years include our community health center, our hospital and rural health center, our designated mental health agency, our state office of economic services, and our addiction treatment hub.
These decisions to invest public money in places made solely for vehicles have caused real harm. Imagine the daily reality of navigating these public services without a vehicle. You can take a bus, but because of the need to service all the sprawl, a 20-minute loop between Lyndonville and St. Johnsbury becomes a bus every two hours. A quick visit to get labs or a prescription takes half the day.
It’s a system that tells its users that their time doesn’t have value. You could walk from town, which would take about 30 minutes from St Johnsbury to the clinics, but you would find yourself pressed between speeding vehicles, parking lots, and guardrails with no crosswalks or sidewalks.
It’s an environment that tells our many neighbors without vehicles that their lives just don’t matter. These everyday experiences undermine the dignity and the health of many rural Vermonters.
This myth that all rural Vermonters drive also obscures one of the best opportunities we all have to meet our current social, environmental and climate crises — living on a human scale. We need a model of a sustainable future that is more compelling than replacing petroleum extraction with lithium and cobalt extraction for batteries and continuing about our lives.
We have that model right in front of us in our small cities, towns and villages. Here we have the freedom to move and meet our needs without having to spend the over $10,000 per year per driver that it costs to own and operate a private vehicle.
Government can’t be taking people’s cars away, but the government can insist that public investment is in places built for humans. Community organizations from health care to the arts can insist that their services are available to those who can’t or don’t drive.
Any vision of rural Vermont that is just, affordable, healthy and sustainable simply must allow more Vermonters the freedom to live our lives well without being dependent on motorized vehicles.
Individual choices won’t solve our crises, but stepping out of vehicle dependency does dramatically change your interests. Suddenly, dense development, high-quality public space, safe streets and great public transport become vital and personal.
Having more people whose interests — not just their politics — align with a just and sustainable future might just be transformative.
