Renderings of work at Colchester Exit 16. Courtesy photos VTrans.
by C.B. Hall, Vermont Business Magazine As construction season gets underway in Vermont, the Agency of Transportation appears to have resolved the most urgent problems created by last July’s floods — undercut roadways, damaged culverts, washed-out roadside slopes and so forth. Less than 8% of the projects being advertised to prospective bidders this year are directly tied to the floods.
But Jesse Devlin, VTrans’ highway safety and design program manager, said that ”numerous permanent emergency relief projects” currently in or scheduled for design development will be advertised within the next several years.
Several large multiyear road construction projects, meanwhile, continue apace. These include Burlington’s Champlain Parkway, the widening of the I-89 crossing of the Connecticut River at White River Junction, and the revamping of the I-89 interchange with US 2/7 in Colchester.
The Champlain Parkway, aborning after six decades of planning — and litigation by local opponents — will serve motor vehicle, bicycle and pedestrian traffic along a 2.8-mile route that arcs from Shelburne Road (US 7) at I-189 to the Queen City’s downtown.
Phase 1 of that project, which began in 2022, is expected to be completed in July, Burlington Public Works Director Chapin Spencer told VermontBiz. If all continues as planned, the second (and final) phase should get under way in late summer and be in the books sometime in 2026.
The scope of the project comprises a 25-mph roadway, paths for bikes and pedestrians, improved pedestrian crossings and other amenities. The finished product will reflect the welter of considerations — environmental justice, brownfields, traffic forecasts, hazardous wastes, water quality and so forth — that went into the exceptionally long planning process.
The City of Burlington is managing the project, with VTrans and the Federal Highway Administration serving as partners and funding the majority of the work.
The undertaking’s long gestation period witnessed litigation from local residents concerned with the traffic level in the neighborhood just south of the city’s downtown. The concerns gave impetus to a grander plan, which will include development of a 0.3-mile corridor that will siphon off some traffic from the neighborhood onto a multimodal route alongside the Vermont Railway’s Burlington yard. No firm timeline or cost estimate for that construction has yet been established.
Along most of the main route, bicyclists and pedestrians will share a paved path 10 feet wide. At the parkway’s north end, bicyclists will instead get a buffered bike lane, complementing sidewalks redone to meet specifications of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Additionally, Spencer said, a shared-use path is being added at the southern end of the project up to Shelburne Road. Costs for the parkway project, since the city assumed its management in 1998, are expected to total about $86 million.
Big Doings Along I-89
The New Hampshire Department of Transportation is serving as the lead agency for the I-89 Connecticut River bridge, since the state line runs not down the center of the river, as one might expect, but along the Vermont bank; the water beneath the bridge is all in the Granite State.
The project entails creating a center span between the existing parallel, but separate, two-lane spans so as to form a single structure with three lanes for each direction of traffic. With the two new lanes atop the center piers now completed, the current four lanes of traffic are using those lanes and the existing lanes atop the north piers.
Crews are meanwhile replacing the roadway-level structures where the southbound lanes once were. With that work done, those rebuilt lanes and the new ones in the middle will carry the traffic, while the two northside lanes are dismantled and rebuilt.
In the end, motorists will be able to zip across the river on four through lanes, while the outer lanes will accommodate traffic exiting at or entering from the adjacent interchanges on both sides of the river.
Photo: A recent view of the underside of the I-89 Connecticut River bridge from the Vermont side, showing all three sets of piers, with the new ones in the middle. Courtesy photo VTrans.
”We are behind schedule,” said Andrew Silovich, who is managing the project for the New Hampshire Department of Transportation. ”There’s been some unforeseen conditions that were encountered with one of the piers in the river, and just some general issues with the supply chain that a lot of contractors are encountering right now.”
Silovich anticipates completion of the construction work by late summer in 2026. He said the winning bid for the project was about $43 million, but that has risen to about $44 million due to change orders
Ninety-odd miles north on I-89, work on the diverging diamond interchange at Exit 16 in Colchester will resume this fall. When the interchange is complete, traffic on the intersecting highway, U.S. 2/7, will cross over to the left side of the roadway so as to facilitate left-hand turns onto the interstate’s ramps without left-turn lanes, dedicated left-turn signals.
Accordingly, the project website explains, ”vehicles making a left onto the interstate entrance ramps do not have to cross oncoming traffic, creating fewer conflict points.”
In short, it minimizes the tie-ups and concomitant greenhouse-gas emissions that anyone leaving the nearby Costco, for example, and heading onto I-89 southbound knows all too well. The sheer volume of the traffic on US 2/7 — 20,000 or more motor vehicles daily, according to the most recent VTrans statistics — adds an exclamation point to the needs that the current configuration engenders.
Phase I of the work, which consisted of utility relocation, ledge removal, retaining-wall construction and drainage work, has been completed. Phase II, the reconfiguration of U.S. 2/7 to create the DDI itself, coupled with related improvements near the interchange, will commence this fall, with completion of the entire undertaking expected by the summer of 2026. According to VTrans, project costs will total about $14 million.
Reducing ‘Stuckages’ on Vermont 108
The season’s most unique highway project is unfolding on Vermont 108, which snakes its way from Stowe through Smugglers Notch to Jeffersonville. The road enters the headlines regularly when truckers, their attention glued to their GPS devices, ignore roadside signs advising them that the notch ahead is too narrow for big rigs and wind up stuck in the serpentine segment of road in the boulder-strewn mountain pass. Such ”stuckages” average about five a year, according to Todd Sears, deputy director of the Operations and Safety Bureau at VTrans — and inventor of the neologism for the periodic mishaps.
Once the tow-truck crews have gotten the tractor-trailer repositioned on the road, and the trucker has inched the rig back down the mountain, a fine that typically runs to several thousand dollars is enforced, and cynics wag their heads about the latest heedless truck driver. But this year VTrans is working on a better scenario: the agency will install temporary chicanes on either side of the mountain gap.
A chicane is a temporary curve built into a right-of-way for purposes not necessitated by the topography or such limitations. One sees chicanes testing the skills of drivers on auto-racing circuits, for example.
The intention of the project on 108 closely resembles that of the clearance bars suspended in front of some of the Green Mountain State’s covered bridges to let drivers of tall vehicles know if they’re about to slam into the bridge itself — so that they’ll turn back before they get into some expensive trouble.
The chicanes will therefore mimic the narrow passage up ahead, with the aid of appropriately positioned rubber curbing, barrels, and the like. All traffic will follow the chicanes, although, Sears said, ”trucks that are too long will not be able to make it through.” However, the design will allow the truckers to back out harmlessly and then turn back down the mountain.
VTrans will keep the temporary chicanes in place for at least one season — the notch is closed in the winter — and adjust the chicanes’ configurations as needed to suit the experimental purpose most effectively. Ultimately, if the idea proves worthy and gets funding, permanent chicanes will be installed.
Down the mountain from the notch on the Stowe side, another challenge is occupying VTrans planners — and, in this case, other concerned parties. While 108 is really nothing more than a rural highway, in ski season it can at times more closely resemble a linear parking lot, as a line of cars and the eager skiers in them make their way, very slowly, from Stowe village to the Stowe Mountain Resort.
While Green Mountain Transit had been operating a shuttle bus between the village and the resort for years, when the ski season arrived in 2022 the resort took the initiative with a further step designed to reduce the congestion, instituting a parking fee of $30 at high-demand parking lots at the base of the ski slope. The fee applies to all cars carrying fewer than four passengers on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays.
The combined traffic-reduction measures translated into a reduction in significant traffic delays from 16 during the 2020-21 season to four during the 2022-23 season, according to Matt Lillis, director of operations at the famous destination.
A federal grant is paying 80% of the shuttle service’s cost, with the 20% local match being covered by partners in Stowe, including the resort and the town. Generally, the bus runs every 15 minutes on weekends and holidays and every 30 minutes on other days. But while the service provided 93,000 rides last ski season, that impressive ridership has not turned 108 back into the quiet country road it was once upon a time.
”There isn’t any one fix to these types of issues,” said Amy Bell, bureau director in VTrans’s Policy, Planning and Intermodal Development Division.
The traffic ”hasn’t decreased as much as we’d like, but at least it’s moving,” Stowe Town Manager Charles Safford said. ”I give a lot of credit to Green Mountain Transit and the Stowe Mountain Resort.”
When the snows close the notch for the winter, he said, 108 becomes ”the state’s busiest dead-end road.”
A new study commissioned by the town calls for the state to put in a traffic signal at a key intersection on 108, and a strategically placed roundabout on Vermont 100 — the Waterbury-Stowe Road — to improve the traffic flow through the village.
But, Safford said, ”I don’t think people are looking to get four- to six-lane highways going through Stowe Village up to the mountain.” Widening the road, after all, would be little different from giving someone a longer belt to fix an obesity problem.
”That’s not to say that investment by the state for intersection improvements and the like wouldn’t work and be welcomed,” he opined. Citing the law just enacted in Montpelier to encourage housing construction, he said the state has ”the responsibility to support the infrastructure for the growth that they’ve started with Act 47.”
Bridge Over Troubled Traffic
Increasingly, the Agency of Transportation also concerns itself with how people and freight get around by means other than cars, buses and trucks. Among other things, that means upkeep on the 305 miles of state-owned railroads, which, like the state’s highways, needed many emergency fixes in the wake of last July’s flood, and still need some remediation work, according to Selden Houghton, president of the Vermont Rail System, whose operations use the state-owned tracks.
But the biggest pending project under the off-road heading is the construction of the bridge — dubbed the East-West Crossing — that will carry cyclists and pedestrians across I-89 in South Burlington, liberating foot-powered travelers from the unpleasantries of dodging traffic on adjacent U.S. 2 (also known as Williston Road), which nearly 39,000 motor vehicles travel every day.
Photo: City of South Burlington rendering of East-West bridge over I-89. Courtesy photo VTrans.
Fulfillment of the $22.7 million project was secured in mid-March, when U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., announced approval of a federal grant of just over $8 million to complete its funding. Other federal grants and $4.3 million in tax increment financing will cover the rest of the costs, South Burlington Community Development Director Ilona Blanchard told VermontBiz. Construction is to begin early next year, with completion slated for late 2026.
The bridge and its approaches will lead from an on-road bicycle lane on Williston Road west of the interchange to a dedicated off-road bike-and-pedestrian path on Dorset Street, Blanchard said.
She added that she and her colleagues were also working on direct access to and from University Mall as part of the project, and that South Burlington had asked the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission to study further improvements to the west of the crossing, to improve access to and from Burlington’s bike routes.
”We’re really excited about what this bridge means for our city center as a possibility for residents to use active transportation,” she said. ”This kind of connection is really important for our region to function as a successful, live-work-and-play region.”
The season’s off-road work will also include a less conspicuous project whose likes Vermont hasn’t seen in many a year, if ever — the replacement of a bridge for motor vehicles with one exclusively for pedestrians and bicyclists.
That’s on the to-do list in Ludlow, where the bridge carrying Mill Street over the Black River, closed since 2007, will yield to an 8-foot-wide structure for foot-powered travelers only.
With its arching profile, the new bridge will also be less vulnerable to the onslaught of floodwaters, such as those that inundated Ludlow last July. The construction, to be completed this fall, will cost just over $2 million, according to VTrans.
Expansion of Vermont’s passenger rail service is meanwhile inching toward reality. The transportation bill recently approved by the Vermont House of Representatives and sent on to the Senate calls on VTrans to consider, in its next state rail plan, additional service on the route of Amtrak’s Washington, D.C. to St. Albans Vermonter train.
That could mean, for example, a second daily train reaching as far north as White River Junction, perhaps as a northward extension of Amtrak’s Valley Flyer, which since 2019 has provided two round trips daily between the Washington-to-Boston corridor and Greenfield, Massachusetts., just south of the Vermont border.
As it happens, the federal government recently awarded the state $500,000 to begin planning work for a second service on the Vermonter line, but State Rep. Sara Coffey, D-Guilford, chair of the House Transportation Committee, said that she and fellow House member Mollie Burke, D-Brattleboro, put the expansion idea before the Legislature without knowing of the federal grant.
The coincidence of the federal award, in Coffey’s words, presents ”a great possibility” to bring the Valley Flyer up to the Green Mountain State.
”Getting people out of their cars and onto rail is a big part of how we need to diversify transportation in our state,” she said, commenting in broader terms on the policy foundations made manifest in the transportation legislation. She noted, for example, that electric-vehicle chargers, the subject of five of the bill’s 55 pages, represent ”a new part of our state’s infrastructure” — requiring investment just as pavement and highway culverts long have.
C.B. Hall is a freelance writer from southern Vermont.
Read the related story on 2024 construction projects on the VermontBiz website HERE.
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