This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in The News & Citizen on Nov. 27
Though not a perfect obstruction, the first season of chicanery in Smugglers Notch has largely been considered a success by the Agency of Transportation.
After years of stuck tractor-trailer trucks being accepted as an unavoidable part of maintaining the scenic byway connecting Cambridge and Stowe during the warmer months of the year, the installation of temporary chicane barriers on either side of the Notch resulted in just one incident of a large vehicle obstructing the highway, and it wasn’t even a truck.
“We’re very encouraged by what we saw this year. We’re looking forward to next year and seeing what happens,” Todd Sears, deputy director of operations and safety at the agency, said. “I was especially happy that — I wasn’t happy that we had the one local bus — but we didn’t have any tractor trailers this year.”
Sears has overseen the multi-agency effort to get trucks out of the Notch. Efforts toward this end ramped up after Secretary of Transportation Joe Flynn sent a letter to the Stowe Selectboard in 2021, in which he said 92 trucks had been stuck in the Notch since 2009, about 8.4 trucks per year, and 12 trucks had been stuck in the Notch each year in 2013, 2014 and 2017.
Various efforts like increased signage and steeper fines for drivers worked to curtail these perennial impediments and brought this number down. Just six trucks were stuck in 2021 and five in 2022 and 2023.
Last year, Sears and the agency unveiled a new strategy to bring the count down even further: Chicanes — barriers designed to simulate the sharp turns in the road made to avoid the massive boulders that are a hallmark of the Notch — were installed.
The chicanes were just one of several deterrent options the agency considered, and the barriers were made from temporary material this first season to allow them to be easily adapted depending on how drivers reacted.
With just one stuck bus in September, the Notch closed 2024 with the lowest number of stuck vehicles in over a decade, at least, and ensured its return next year. Last week, transportation workers could be seen disassembling the chicanes for the season.
Though multiple successful seasons could see a permanent chicane installment made from material that blends better into the area aesthetically, next year will see the same temporary material as Sears and the agency assess the multi-year impact of the barriers while collecting feedback from locals and visitors alike.
“We’ll be putting the system up next year to collect another season of data, and we’ll see where we go from there,” Sears said. “But we’re super happy with all of the work that our engineers and our partners put in to make this happen this year.”
Gaps within the chicane system remain, and time will tell how vulnerable to exploitation those gaps might be. On the very day the new chicanes opened last spring, a truck simply drove around the Cambridge-side barrier and entered the Notch. He was warned off by an Agency of Natural Resources employee who happened to be on-site before getting stuck.
Sears said there have been some reports of other drivers doing the same.
“They basically drove on the other side of the road so that they could take a straighter shot. That happened comparatively infrequently, but that’s something that we might look at,” Sears said. “On the Stowe side, because of where the chicanes were placed, there were some motorists that used the Barnes Camp parking lot to get around it.”
While there’s no data yet to support this conjecture, Sears also speculated that the chicanes may have caused the GPS systems that freight truck drivers rely on, which are mostly built on crowdsourced reports from other drivers, to increasingly warn tractor-trailer drivers away from Route 108.
While Sears continues to review data and make adjustments, the success of its inaugural season means that the chicane era has likely only just begun in Smugglers Notch.
The pass through the Notch closed to through traffic last week, but transportation officials said it could reopen should conditions allow.
