BURLINGTON — After more than six decades of starts and stops, legal fights and revisions to plans already revised, the final segment of Burlington’s Champlain Parkway opened to the public Monday, bringing online a major new car and bicycle connection through the city’s South End.
The project now links Interstate 189 to Lakeside Avenue along a route that circumvents the southern end of Pine Street and its adjoining neighborhoods. The segment that opened Monday runs from the interstate to Home Avenue. A portion from Home Avenue to Lakeside Avenue, which also features bike and pedestrian paths, opened in 2024.
That it took so many years to finish the project was a major focus — and source of more than a few jokes — at a formal opening ceremony Monday morning. City officials blasted music from the 1960s throughout the event, including The Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” just after they cut a 61-foot ribbon across the roadway.
A 1965 Ford Mustang, produced the same year the project was conceived, led a procession of city, state and federal officials up the road as the event concluded.
The project will cost about $85 million in total, mostly funded by the federal government through a cost-sharing agreement with the state and city as is typical for major infrastructure projects. In addition to the new road itself, the project includes new water and sewer infrastructure aimed at reducing runoff into nearby Lake Champlain.
“Given this project is older than many of us standing here, I must remark what a long, strange trip this has been,” Chapin Spencer, Burlington’s director of public works, told the crowd. But the city has “proven that we can do hard things together,” he added, “and this is an amazing win.”
The version of the project that opened Monday is far from what was envisioned 61 years ago, when officials proposed a four-lane, high-speed extension of I-189 along the city’s waterfront, known as the “Southern Connector.” That plan was later scrapped and, in more recent years, downsized to a two-lane road with a 25 mph speed limit that officials say is much friendlier to those who walk or bike and will result in a lower volume of car traffic being shepherded into the city than was originally envisioned.
Exactly how big the project would be and where it would run was the subject of decades of legal fights. It cleared a key hurdle in May 2023 when a federal judge granted summary judgement to the federal, state and city governments over a challenge from a group of local residents called Friends of Pine Street.
Parts of that lawsuit centered on arguments that the parkway would disproportionately impact the Maple and King street neighborhoods, which surround where traffic from the new roadway funnels into downtown along a reconstructed portion of Pine Street.
A separate but related project to direct traffic around the Maple and King neighborhoods, called the Railyard Enterprise Project, is underway, but officials are still in the process of securing the rights to build on their planned route, Spencer said at Monday’s event. He said the public works department expects to have an update for the city council on the project in the next month or two.
City officials touted Monday how the Champlain Parkway, for its part, will reduce congestion on Shelburne Road and around much of the South End. They’ll be monitoring traffic data over the next few years to see whether or not that goal is achieved. The project will also provide a direct link between the interstate and an area in the South End where plans are in place for hundreds of new apartments.
Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said that means the project’s completion “isn’t the finish line.”
“It’s the infrastructure that will support the next generation of Burlington’s growth,” she said, adding it “will help us build more housing, improve mobility, strengthen our neighborhoods and reduce environmental impacts while creating a city where people have real choices (for) how they live and how they get around.”
U.S. Sen. Peter Welch., D-Vt., who was also on hand to cut the ribbon, said the project’s protracted timeline is a case study in the need to speed up how long major construction projects take to build in the U.S. He said federal officials need to find a way to expedite project reviews while balancing the need to scrutinize potential environmental impacts.
“Sixty-one years is a little long,” Welch said, drawing laughs from the crowd. “Why don’t we, in the federal government, make certain that we take responsibility — so projects are not stuck and stalled.”
