News and Updates

This was the question posed to the local State Rep. Sarah Copeland. This article highlights a recent Selectboard meeting in Fairlee, VT.

The article discusses fundamental discussion of development and what infrastructure is required for it, but also, the basic premise - what type of development is desired?

“… the lack of a sewer has turned several potential tenants away from Bradford’s industrial park and curtailed the development of a bigger grocery story, pointing out that more acreage is needed for a business to install the required septic system and backup.”

“Short of a sewer, the next best draw would be high-speed Internet,”

The creation of a sewer system makes sense - as well as allowing dense development rather than very spread out rural development necessary for proper septic design.

See the rest of the article here.

Tonight the local Chittenden County crowd was treated to a discussion with Senator Bernie Sanders at the 2007 CCMPO Annual Meeting. Sanders brought the rather progressive discussion from the Executive Director Scott Johnstone up a level by providing some legitimacy of federal policy and probably more importantly ..dollars to the discussion.

Much as the ULI’s annual meeting discussed transportation as it relates to land use - the more fundamental discussion is based on finding money to pay for transportation infrastructure that pretty much everyone agrees is necessary. The ULI discussion highlights comments from John Horsley from AASHTO discussing the VMT method of fees - but says it is out of reach for 10 to 20 years…

John Horsley, executive director of the American Association State
Highway and Transportation Officials, pointed out the impending crisis
at the federal level, a consequence of rapid increases in the price of
materials needed in construction and a flat gas tax per gallon which
has not been raised in 14 years. The highway trust fund is expected to
generate less income than planned spending by 2009, a deficit which
would cause sharp reductions in funding to states. New approaches for
charging drivers, such as by miles driven, may be more effective in the
10-20 year period, but for now AASHTO is calling for a 10-cent increase
in the federal gas tax to restore its buying power.

Come on… 10 to 20 years for a sustainable funding mechanism to be established? This could be established much sooner than that if people are willing to move forward and face the future.

Senator Sanders discussed his future role in the next transportation bill and mention that impacts from global warming, supporting transit, and moving people from their SOVs are intentions - however - given the recent reports from AASHTO and ASCE of the inadequacy of our current transportation infrastructure - significant pressure is being placed on highway infrastructure replacement. While this is of course an extremely important area we much address - but, perhaps first we need to decide … when is it time to NOT replace some infrastructure. The Operation and Maintaince of our current system is tremoundous, and the costs of maintaining it will only continue to increase given the future demand for oil based materials will increase in cost.

I urged the Senator to use the term Sprawl in his discussions in the next transportation bill. This term should be used to denote the unsustainable land use and development patterns leading to inefficient transportation systems (only one significant cost of sprawl).

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Hello All -

This weekend we have a big event going on nationwide - calling for a 80% reduction in Carbon emissions by 2050! Now - that is a big goal - but hey - lets start big for two reasons (1) We need to in order to minimize the already catastrophic effects of Global Warming (2) If you start with a grand goal - perhaps we can get close to it!

Go here to find out more: http://stepitup2007.org/index.php

For all of those reading this Blog from the good state of Vermont there are something like 65 or so events planned all over the State!

I will be attending the one in Burlington on the 14th. That is if the winter weather doesn’t destroy the whole thing and Senator Sanders can come and participate. Vermont Actions.  The local Burlington Step It Up Site:

In other news:
The City of Burlington is starting to put some additional measures into effect to help curb the Carbon emissions from our tailpipes with the recent proclamation by the Mayor on an Anti-Idling Campaign. The Burlington police will now begin enforcing a law that has been on the books for the past several years.

It is good to see that Burlington’s retail establishments are seeing that supporting the biking crowd can perhaps be a beneficial business plan - If we can all reduce our vehicle miles driven - we can improve our air quality, reduce our roadway congestion, become healthier (as we walk and bike more), and hopefully reduce our impact on this earth.

Check out the program here - and encourage your business to sign up! [Bicycle Benefits]

I would encourage you to support these businesses and to all show your support for a City wide business plan that supports local first!
The benefits of bicycling [link to article]

Published: Wednesday, April 11, 2007
By Lauren Ober
Free Press Staff Writer

The benefits of bicycling are many: improved physical fitness, zero carbon emissions and reduction in road congestion. Now, thanks to a new initiative called Bicycle Benefits, discounts on coffee, clothing, shoes and food can be added to the list.Bicycle Benefits began in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and is the brainchild of brothers Ian, 29, and Dillon Klepetar, 21. The program is simple. Local businesses reward cyclists in the form of discounts for riding bicycles instead of driving cars. Discounts are no less than 10 percent and can go up to 25 percent.

As long as cyclists have a Bicycle Benefits sticker on their helmets, they are entitled to the discounts at participating businesses. Having to show the helmet with the sticker is a way of promoting bicycle safety, Dillon Klepetar said.

The program has operated successfully in Saratoga Springs for two years and the younger Klepetar, a junior at St. Michael’s College, recently brought it to Burlington, hoping that people here will be even more receptive to the idea of providing incentives for alternative modes of transportation.

Klepetar, a psychology and political science major, peddled the program to local businesses all winter and has 23 on board, including American Apparel, Dobra Tea, Nectar’s and ECHO science center and aquarium. He sold the idea to the businesses as an opportunity to increase revenue.

“More people are going to go through their doors because they’re a bicycle destination,” Klepetar said. “If bikers know they’ll get a discount, they’re more likely to go.”

In choosing the businesses to approach, Klepetar said he wanted one from “each discipline” to retain the benefits the business might gain from participating. To that end, there is one Thai restaurant, one pizza joint, one shoe store, etc., and there is very little overlap. In Saratoga Springs, about 50 merchants participate in the program.

“They’re happy because they sort of monopolize the environmental community in town,” Klepetar said.

Klepetar is almost messianic in his desire to see fewer cars on the road and more people biking or walking. The program’s mission — to get people out of cars and onto bikes — sums up his personal philosophy. The towheaded student, who wears plastic bags inside his shoes to keep his feet dry while biking in the winter, says people need to start living a sustainable lifestyle.

“I think we need to re-evaluate the convenience and impact of driving a car. Biking is healthy on many different levels,” he said.

Chapin Spencer, executive director of Local Motion, a nonprofit bicycling/pedestrian advocacy organization, applauds the program’s goals, but said its success relies on people’s knowing about the program.

“It needs a fair bit of horsepower to sustain it and market it,” Spencer said. “The challenge is to organize it so it’s viable long-term.”

Spencer said Local Motion is committed to helping Klepetar get Bicycle Benefits off the ground and said that in the future they would like to see a pedestrian element to the program.

Local merchants seem to be on board with the program. American Apparel manager Melissa Claus said she thinks “it’s pretty cool,” and said it’s definitely something the forward-thinking retail company wants to promote. Kathy Bouton, manager of the Peace & Justice Store, said she likes the idea of people’s being rewarded for not using their cars.

“We want to support anything that’s not adding to global warming,” Bouton said.

Klepetar says Burlington is the perfect city to support the Bicycle Benefits program because many people commute year-round on bikes, and if they can be rewarded for using a bicycle, that should be all the more reason to abandon the car and strap on the helmet.

“It’s about making the inconvenient choice because it’s right,” Klepetar said about biking instead of driving. “You have to listen to your environmental conscience.”

Contact Lauren Ober at 660-1868 or lober@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com

The Vermont Agency of Transportation is in the process of updating their guidelines for conducting Traffic Impact Studies. These studies determine what type, location, and relative impact development has on the transportation system in the State. I have compiled some comments that I have on the proposed guidelines.

You can find the proposed guidelines here: [pdf]

The primary issue at hand is the idea of urbanization. I am a Vermonter - a 7th generation at that - and love my state. I know it has changed substantially during the lifetime of many of the ‘oldtimers’. Due to many reasons, but fundamentally, I feel by the segmentation and breakdown of our ‘rural’ way of life. In the past we have been fortunate to maintain our very traditional New England lifestyle of villages and town centers surrounded by farm and forest. However, highways have been built bringing additional money and opportunity to the hills of Vermont, we have been able to support ourselves by living farther away from our workplace. Thereby spreading out.

This has had severe impacts on our lifestyles, community spirit, and not to mention transportation systems. As a way to curb the sprawling effect of our development, I want to encourage more people to live again in a denser village center, perhaps urban, environment.

I feel that our current policies in the transportation world have worked against that desire. Creating perverse incentives to develop on green fields, spreading out our development away from our village centers. These comments, though brief, are an attempt to spread some light and start a discussion of this phenomena.

-Jon

Jon Slason comments:

1.) We should not paraphrase in a document like this. It becomes a legal document used throughout the permitting process. Anytime a paraphrased definition is used, it weakens the meaning of the term. When referring to terms we should be precise and use exact traffic/transportation engineering terminology.

2.) Examples should also be removed. A TIS guideline document should present the traffic/engineering professional a document in which to reference the applicable standards that Vermont uses – not educate them on their job. If examples are placed to provide guidance to developers or lay persons, then a second document should be developed that could be an appendix perhaps.

3.) V/C ratio should be mentioned and described how the State uses V/C ratios. What V/C ratio is acceptable?

4.) How does development occur when traffic impacts already congested intersections? What portion of mitigation is the new traffic responsible for? The State of California for instance uses a very unique, though rather impractical, policy that states if the intersection is LOS F new developments can only increase delay by 2.0 seconds overall. This lead to a lot of very specific signal tweaking as mitigation which would reduce delay but that probably never truly occur in the field.

5.) Allowance for urban growth in the LOS policy. Currently due to traffic constraints (one among many other reasons) many developers shy away from developing in brownfields, previously developed areas, or urban areas, because of a LOS policy that does not allow for congestion. Instead, this pushes development to the edge of an urban area into areas either where capacity currently exists or where adding additional capacity is relatively cheap. Many of our national beloved urban centers would not be built if they were required to document that their transportation impacts would not impact nearby intersections worse than LOS C or D. The benefits of an urban transportation system are obvious and I am sure, well known to you.

Younger urban areas confront a chicken and egg scenario where they generate too much traffic to be permitted but are often not dense enough to reduce VMT (use of transit, walking, biking, etc). We need a LOS policy that would allow designated growth centers (designated by the Vermont Legislature) to have a separate LOS policy. This would allow these growth centers to determine their own policies and mitigation strategies for impacts, such as the development of transit O&M funds, payment in-lieu of systems, etc. I mention the growth centers, because it would be unwise to let every development claim they have this right to allow for poor LOS simply because they are in a capacity constrained area.

I would suggest that based on the notion that congestion is not always a bad thing – this kind of policy be investigated further. High levels of congestion can be conducive to slower vehicle speeds and actually encourage more biking and walking. I feel that our traffic policies as a profession has severely hampered our ability to develop tight-knit urban systems such as been developed in the past.

6.) Unsignalized intersections: If I read the language as now stated in the new LOS Policy – it can be interpreted (by placing that last sentence into the document) that if a side street experiences LOS worse than LOS “D” (LOS E and F) then the intersection is unsafe. This is a statement that could lead to potentially many legal issues because of the wording in Act 250 Criterion 5 and 9. I simply want to note my hesitation to including that last sentence.

From an anecdotal perspective, on higher speed, uncongested roadways, it could be very true that LOS D is a proper safety threshold. However, on slower speed roads or very congested highways, poor LOS may not necessarily denote “unsafe” conditions. I would be happy to see some conversation again on V/C ratios playing a part in unsignalized intersection operational analysis.

Thank you for letting me submit my comments. These comments represent my views only and not those of RSG or any other organization that I affiliate with.