Elaine Russell was trying to avoid Pine Street. She and her husband were driving from Burlington home to Vergennes, and road construction was the last thing they wanted to wrangle on Labor Day Weekend.
So she motored east on Maple Street past Pine to the four-way stop with St. Paul Street, with plans to turn right there. It was dark by 9 p.m., but Russell could see that the familiar intersection had changed. Brand-new granite curbs jutted into the roadway, narrowing the passage by several feet.
In an effort to avoid a large pickup turning west onto Maple from St. Paul, Russell kept hard to the right and heard her vehicle’s rocker panel scrape along the new curb. The noise was so loud that patrons at the nearby St. Paul Street Gastrogrub jumped out of their seats.
The truck drove off, and Russell drove home with at least $1,000 in damage to her 2017 Nissan Sentra.
“It just totally upset me,” Russell said. “I did not expect that at all.”
St. Paul Street is the first example of Burlington’s Great Streets Initiative, which aims to create friendlier roadways for walkers and cyclists by building wider sidewalks, tree belts and bike lanes. What Russell encountered is a streetscaping feature known as a “bump-out,” which is intended to lessen the road-crossing distance for pedestrians.
As part of the initiative, the city wants to make 26 downtown blocks — all contained by Maple, Battery, Pearl and South Union — narrower, some dramatically so. Main Street could go from 71 feet wide at one spot to a slim 38. The redesign would also eliminate dozens of parking spots along the stretch.
Great Streets is a long-range plan with no real timeline, but the concept alone is controversial. Burlington has long struggled to balance the needs of people who use alternative transportation and those who drive and park on city streets. The project, with its bike lanes and traffic-calming designs, is an ambitious attempt to serve the former. But if St. Paul, a major transportation artery, is their introduction, drivers won’t likely think these Great Streets are so great.
“I think it’s bad. I just think it’s a tough intersection,” City Councilor Franklin Paulino (D-North District) said of St. Paul at Maple. “It’s always going to be … no matter what kind of city planning we end up doing.”
The Burlington City Council first documented a desire for street design standards in a 1996 municipal plan. Fifteen years later, a 2011 transportation plan coined the term “Great Streets,” which were codified in the 2013 planBTV Downtown and Waterfront Master Plan. In 2015, voters OK’d a $10 million tax-increment financing bond to improve St. Paul and Main streets. The city council approved the St. Paul project, which spans two blocks from Main to Maple, last August. Construction began the day after Labor Day 2018 with an expected completion date of May 24, 2019.
Nearly four months after that date, the project is still unfinished. Crews from S.D. Ireland hit snags when they unearthed contaminated soil and fuel tanks in the construction area last fall. Engineers also spent an inordinate amount of time coordinating with private utilities after discovering that many subterranean service lines needed to be replaced before they were paved over. The delays added $260,000 to the $4.9 million project, which is primarily paid for with TIF dollars and several special revenue funds, such as from parking meters.
The renovation caused even more headaches August 30 when an excavator hit a gas line, disrupting the Friday night Church Street dinner rush.
Richard Vaughn, owner of Perky Planet Coffee at St. Paul and King streets, said he never would have opened in January if he’d known the project would drag on. The shop’s mission is to hire workers with disabilities, but Vaughn says he’s only making enough to pay four very part-time employees; most days, he’s the one behind the counter.
Vaughn said the construction has cost Perky Planet $10,000 a month. In late July, he filed a claim against the city’s insurance seeking $62,500 in relief. The city has not yet responded.
“This isn’t who I am. This isn’t what I want to do,” Vaughn said of his formal complaint, adding, “The original timeline that I relied on when I built this place was fantasy.”
The city now estimates that St. Paul will be open to traffic and business by the end of September. When it is, Mayor Miro Weinberger says the area will go from “a little-visited, peripheral part of our downtown” to “one of the nicest streets.”
Indeed, all Great Streets include a variety of amenities. Illustrations show wider, wheelchair-accessible sidewalks; gardens that capture and filter storm water; terraces for art installations or covered bike parking; and decks with built-in seating. Promotional documents speak to the possibilities: “What if you could watch the sun set over the lake while sitting on a swing at Main and Pine?” one reads.
But something has to give to make room for all these perks, and on Main Street, it’s parking. The Great Streets design cuts 43 of the 161 existing parking spots and transitions them from diagonal to parallel. Main Street’s 99-foot public right-of-way — the widest in the city — lends itself to a dramatic Great Streets transformation, Weinberger said. Burlington is moving from an automobile-centric city to an environmentally conscious one, he said.
“You still get a lot of parking,” Weinberger said, adding that Great Streets represents a “holistic understanding of how the public right-of-way should be used.”
Burlington Public Works Director Chapin Spencer said the parking sacrifice will be worth it: Tree canopies will flourish, and businesses will get more frontage for outdoor seating — all elements “essential to a thriving downtown,” he said.
Before Spencer took the public works gig in 2013, he founded and led Local Motion, a Burlington nonprofit that promotes biking and walking. The group’s current executive director, Karen Yacos, said that cars should no longer be king of the streets. Wider sidewalks encourage people to mingle and shop, and narrower streets will force drivers to slow down.
“A street with just a narrow sidewalk and a bunch of car parking is not a vibrant place,” Yacos said. She said the new thoroughfares would feel “like Church Street without shutting off the whole street.”
Paulino, the city councilor, noted that biking isn’t practical for everyone, and his constituents have expressed a desire for more car parking downtown. They’ve also complained about the St. Paul-Maple street curb design. So Paulino stood at the corner on September 2 for 20 minutes and watched vehicles negotiate the tighter turn.
“It was crazy,” he said in summary.
Seven Days, too, did some unscientific analysis. Over the course of an hour on September 3, approximately 600 vehicles passed through the intersection during the afternoon rush. Only three drivers hit the curb, but the vast majority made extra-wide turns in an effort to avoid colliding with it or another driver.
After the new features were installed a few weeks ago, the staff at the Gastrogrub on St. Paul started a “curb kill count” and tallied a dozen hits in a single evening, bartender Rob LaClair recalled. The scuffed and blackened curb is evidence.
Similar stories have been told at nearby Handy’s Lunch and on Front Porch Forum, where one woman lamented that she had to “back up halfway down Maple” to make room for a turning school bus. Green Mountain Transit is avoiding the junction altogether after concluding “from a geometry perspective, it was too tight,” interim general manager Jon Moore said.
“Green Mountain Transit does support pedestrian infrastructure improvements,” he added. “There are some merits there. We just want to be sure we can be compatible.”
Once St. Paul reopens, GMT’s green line will resume traveling north and south on that street, no turns necessary; Weinberger expects that will be true for most drivers. But Paulino said the road design won’t completely dissuade larger vehicles from taking turns.
“We’ll never be able to tell people which way to go to work,” he said. “People drive the shortest route.”
City Councilor Brian Pine (P-Ward 3) said he tested the intersection in the smaller of his family’s two vehicles. He made it without striking the bump-out, but in doing so, crossed into the opposing lane of traffic. Pine said he’s reserving judgment until the project is fully complete.
“If it doesn’t work, we have to be ready to do something about it,” he said. “I hope we don’t, because that will be very costly.”
City engineer Norm Baldwin said drivers are coming to conclusions before the intersection is finished. Traffic will flow differently after upper St. Paul is open: A fresh coat of pavement will reduce the curb’s height, and crews will paint stop bars in the proper places, he said.
Still, the city is taking citizen concerns to heart. Baldwin said planners are leaving the curb unfinished while they monitor traffic over the next few weeks. If the city concludes the bump-out is too intrusive, workers could fix it before finishing touches are made, Baldwin said.
In the meantime, people are certainly taking the turn more carefully than ever before. Does that mean the city’s plan to slow traffic is working?
“In some ways, it is; in some ways, it’s not,” Baldwin said. “That’s why we’re monitoring the situation, and our team is on it.”
Spencer, the DPW director, acknowledged drivers’ frustration but said the Great Streets success story shouldn’t be marred by the curb conundrum. Despite the St. Paul project’s delays, he said, the initiative’s coordinated approach — to bury utility lines, improve water infrastructure and repave streets all at once — saves more time and money than if the city were to tackle these issues separately.
Future Great Streets projects will likely be just as complex as St. Paul, but in Spencer’s view, the temporary disruption is well worth it to reinvest in the city’s aging infrastructure.
“At some point, we can’t just sit around and put a Band Aid and duct tape on stuff,” he said.
“Are we going to be perfect on our first install? No,” he added. “But this street is going to be remarkably great for the city for generations to come.”
As for Russell, the Vergennes driver, the hefty repair bill from her curb encounter was enough to make her reconsider ever driving down St. Paul again.
“I took that one off my list,” she said with a laugh. “I’ll fight with Pine Street from now on.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Curb Sides | Burlington’s first ‘Great Street’ confounds drivers”
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This article appears in Sep 11-17, 2019.
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To be clear, our complaint is not the length of construction but rather the willful production of false and misleading information on the part of the City in order to avoid certain State-mandated Environmental Guidelines.
The City produced a schedule under the knowingly false assumption that the soils under Saint Paul were pristine. They did this to in order to avoid wide-spectrum testing mandated by the State for projects where soil contamination is known or suspected. That testing is costly and risky-other contaminants could have been found-increasing mitigation costs. On August 9, 2018, the City of Burlington in conjunction with the DPW and CEDO, Great Streets BTV St. Paul Street Update.
This document laid out a work schedule for the reconstruction of St. Paul Street between Main and Maple. This document should have provided a good faith estimate of the scope and timeline of the work to be completed based on what was known at the time by the City. It did not.
The City knew that this project would encounter contaminated soils, yet this document presented a timeline that was based on the knowingly false assumption that the soils were pristine. It excluded work that the City knew had to be completed when the contractor inevitably encountered contaminated soils. These misrepresentations and omissions were purposeful and calculated in an attempt by the City to avoid having to comply with the GUIDANCE FOR CONSTRUCTION OF PUBLIC WORKS PROJECTS IN AREAS WHERE CONTAMINATION IS SUSPECTED OR KNOWN, published by the DEC on 3/22/02.
The City has a responsibility to secure, protect, and preserve the highest level of public trust. We did take into account that construction projects are often times delayed due to unforeseen conditions, we did not anticipate that the published timeline would be based on material misrepresentations and omissions.
@ Spencer, the DPW director, acknowledged drivers’ frustration but said the Great Streets success story shouldn’t be marred by the curb conundrum. Despite the St. Paul project’s delays, he said, the initiative’s coordinated approach to bury utility lines, improve water infrastructure and repave streets all at once saves more time and money than if the city were to tackle these issues separately.
Hey Spencer! The article is mostly about traffic being unable to easily maneuver the streets. Talk about that. Is that what you want so that drivers will avoid the area. If it is great plan to make Burlington more livable. Not!
You want to make it more livable…………. how about the police dept enforcing the laws of the road for all. When was the the last time someone on a bike was ticketed for running a red light or stop sign?
Cry me a river. It shouldn’t be easy to drive, or park, downtown. The City should be focusing on improving walking, biking, and transit infrastructure. Everyone having a car and expecting to be able to drive anywhere at any time is not sustainable.
“The original timeline that I relied on when I built this place was fantasy.”
That should be on the Burlington official seal and flag because it is true about almost everything dealing with this town. I truly believe that the collective magical thinking fantasy that many in this town operate out of has grown to the point that it could be diagnosed as a mental illness. If a person exhibited such repeatedly aggressive ignorance toward anything real or logical they would be deemed incompetent. “Progressivism” is Burlington’s religion, with just as much logic, reason and belief in fantastical dogma as Catholicism during the middle ages.
“What if you could watch the sun set over the lake while sitting on a swing at Main and Pine?” Great, as long as you don’t turn your head to see the accident nearby or hear the loud explosions of cars hitting the curb beneath your bucolic hallucination.
The new designs are fine if you’re going straight thru! But heaven help you if you have to turn right or left and are a truck driver!
I’ve heard new granite curbs have recently been ordered and modifications to move back one side (only) of these new intersections to widen them. It clearly was a bad design from the get go. Let’s hope the modifications help out.
“I think it’s bad. I just think it’s a tough intersection,” City Councilor Franklin Paulino said of St. Paul at Maple. “It’s always going to be … no matter what kind of city planning we end up doing.”
Idiotic, nonsensical statement by an idiot politician. Makes NO sense whatsoEVER.
No, it’s bad beCAUSE of stupid “planning.”
The public works boss thinks curb “bump outs” are good for pedestrians.
Idiocy. Pure idiocy.
Keep electing liberal whack jobs, people. This is what you get.
Curb “bump outs” that make absoLUTEly no sense whatsoever.
And are actually MORE dangerous for pedestrians.
Exact same problem here. Now this will cost me over $1,000 to fix my scratched up rim. Now this is costing the citizens money. 10 cars per day time 7 days a week time how many more month will this go on for? Thousand of dollars spend already from the citizens to get their rims and/or tires fix up. I’m Avoiding this intersection and using pine st instead. But weren’t we trying to direct traffic to other streets instead of all using pine st?
You can get away with not owning a car if a) you’re on vacation, b) you’re unemployed, c) you live in an urban area with well-functioning public transit. Burlington is not urban, so nobody here belongs to “c”…
We all know who the city is built for, and it sure as hell ain’t people who came here to work.
St.Paul St is a major artery into and out of Burlington. Putting these sorts of artificial barriers in the way will encourage people to bypass the intersection by driving a circuitous through the surrounding neighborhoods. Some DPW engineer’s silly idea of an extra-narrow intersection that damages cars and slows traffic to a crawl is misplaced to say the least. Traffic headed out of Burlington is regularly backed up on Maple all the way from St. Paul St. to Battery St. I see it every day as I work there. All those idling vehicles, attaining 0 mpg as they spew exhaust. “Great Streets”? I think not. Not in this case at least.
I am intensely concerned about our city planners being out of touch with reality and what issues burlington faces. I am for safer biking and walking- but it should not be at the significant sacrifice of parking and driving. Biking to Burlington is only feasible for part of our population, and for that part of the population only the toughest could brave the Vermont winter and rainy weather. I agree that Vermonters and tourists should not be so dependent on their cars – but… news flash… by making it harder to find parking and get to a location youre only driving (pun intended) them away from our city. I mean that for both patrons and the businesses that have decided to be in the downtown. If the city doesnt take a serious look at their design decisions in terms of whether a project adds or removes parking the city isnt serving its constituents. I encourage others concerned about the city planners designing in a vacuum to look at the future great streets projects. Lots of parking will continue to be eliminated throughout the downtown. If there were plans to replace those close by spots in other projects – great! But since the city planners and DPW really dont prioritize parking … only biking… Im losing faith.
This city is located in a Northern cold climate where “alternative” transportation is practical maybe 5 months of the year at most, especially for the many not living near a bus line. Bringing back the train and expanding bus service is a great idea, but like it or not cars will always be necessary for much of the year, at least for the employed. Reducing parking, reducing width of intersections? Get real.
This is a travesty! 0.5% not driving carefully enough to avoid the curve! We need to change the street! Or maybe we can let the $1000 in damage serve as a lesson to drive more carefully in densely populated areas. You don’t even need to pay the police to issue tickets.
This plan was an idiotic idea! Trying to make a turn on those streets are rediculous.. There is NO room for any space. And what about in the winter?? Things will be much worse! Obviously no one thought things through that far along! But leave it up to Miro and the rest of the bumbling idiots who plan the projects in Burlington. All new projects should be explained in detail and voted on instead of giving vague information!
I hope the city shows good faith and makes good on the Perky Planet’s loss. That guy got totally screwed.
Burlington’s officials have a million great ideas, fit for a rapidly gentrifying urban center — or to simulate the feeling of that sort of place well enough to make rich folks feel more at home when they come as students, tourists, or pre-retirement telecommuters (that is the “my husband’s firm is actually in Boston” crowd)…
The thing is, one can’t build the kind of upscale, pedestrian-oriented, mixed use city center in a sustainable way without an economic foundation to support it. Burlington has cashflow problems, obviously, if it can’t handle basic infrastructure — but apparently there’s enough to fund the facade at the expense of the foundation. Well-meaning hippies and other virtuous types get sucked into the rhetoric without considering the tradeoffs and the true beneficiaries.
The point: yes, literally everyone would be happier in a place where there were no cars and everyone lived near their workplace, and had a healthy walk/jog/bike to a fulfilling job, where their labor was fairly compensated and fueled by local, sustainable food. But you can’t ALWAYS start at the wrong end of the problem.
Not enough road capacity? Restrict the roads more. Not enough on-street parking? Cut it by an additional 25%. It’s time for the mayor to put his pipe down, he’s had enough.
Miro and the DPW planners are on fantasy island and smoking too much pot!
“Oh no contaminated soils!”
I have heard that one before.
Y’all had no idea there would be contamination and did not plan for it?!?
A likely story.
Hey what about emergency vehicles trying to get to the senior housing before someone dies? How will snow plows handle great city corners – this isnt Florida. Who hires these planning people? Dont we the citizens have a say anymore? Cant wait for next election time but wait a minute if I have free time on Thursdays I can go to the bagel bakery for consultation and condolences from our illustrious mayor.
Did anyone look at the big picture for these new intersections. What about snow removal not like we have very little frozen precipitation the worry about every winter. What about clean up after major snow storms. It is difficult enough to remove snow now the plow drivers have all these unusually shaped corners to maneuver around. Try driving a bus around some of these corners. And not like Burlington can afford to loose more parking. Since the wonderful Idea of the City Place fiasco is going so well we lost a major parking garage and with the new bus station also eliminating many parking spots. Just where do they expect people to park. Sounds like a good reason to shop somewhere that is friendlier to drivers. Congratulations Burlington. Another white elephant to go with the Telecom disator, the city market fiasco and of course the Hospital overrun.
Someone needs to start the process of a class action lawsuit against Burlington DPW and the city to claim damages that have occurred and will continue to occur with this idiotic and ideologically-driven public works debacle. If someone gets seriously injured or worse, Chapin Spencer and Norm Baldwin should be held liable. Creating public transportation arteries that are impassable to buses seems to be a disability rights issue.
sure- EVERYTHING WILL BE WORTH IT- how long has the street been closed? someone needs to give an overhaul to city hall- THAT would be worth it