Inherited Failures

To begin from a process perspective, this project was essentially dead on arrival. The starting point for this current design phase was the CCRPC scoping study that was completed in Summer 2019: before COVID reshaped how and where we live and work; before Burlington declared a climate state of emergency; before Vermont passed the Global Warming Solutions Act. While housing has always been tight in Burlington, this also predates the dramatic worsening of the housing affordability and homelessness crises we are currently facing, and the new drive to increase housing capacity (and implicitly, the transportation consumption) in Burlington.

The design alternatives in the scoping study itself were informed by an even earlier traffic assessment from July 2017, which was performed with data primarily collected in 2015. These reports predate the city's current comprehensive plan and particularly the targets set for shifting mode share away from single-occupancy vehicles.

And so, based on data and traffic studies that predate our mode share goals, bridge design alternatives were locked-in before the COVID, climate, and housing crises became daily policy focuses. That scoping study was then taken off the shelf and used to apply for a federal RAISE grant, which was awarded to the project and laid the foundation for the rest of the funding for this project.

The key failure, however, was in the project team's unwillingness to make any meaningful changes to the project to meet the new realities (and lessons learned) of the world the scoping study did not account for.

Design Failures

This brings me to the second topic, which is specifically how the bridge has failed to move the needle on our city's goals through its design.

While the North American transportation engineering discipline remains decidedly behind the curve, much of the world has woken up to the fact that wider roads facilitate higher speeds, and that faster roads both induce new demand for car traffic and also increase the risk of serious injury for those moving outside of cars. In addition, we know that traffic always inflates to fill the space it is given until congestion reaches equilibrium, and that the only way to shift that equilibrium point for traffic congestion is to provide viable alternatives to driving. These facts are actually well reflected in the City of Burlington's many planning documents, from our "Great Streets" initiative that prioritizes traffic calming and multi-modal movement in our downtown, to our goal to shift transportation mode share by investing in our active transportation network (and relying on the externality of GMT—a seperate topic).

Unfortunately, the design of the bridge and intersection predate many of these goals that have been set for what is approaching a decade—even though it won't break ground for another two years from now! Instead of encouraging less car traffic at slower speeds, the bridge has gained 4-to-6 additional feet (depending on the alignment) of roadway width across the four lanes, and the intersection has had its geometry streamlined. These two changes will almost certainly increase the average speed on the bridge and through the intersection from today's averages, which will make the collisions that do happen more deadly, while simultaneously inviting more people to choose to drive. And because of the fundamental space challenges that single-occupancy vehicles present, peak rush hour congestion is not even projected to improve much from this increased design capacity.

The design of the active transportation facilities, while improving on the essentially non-existant bike/ped facilities today, are also an afterthought. The bridge is a key chokepoint for regional bike commuting, and should have been designed with fast, comfortable, and seperated lanes for cyclists to safely cross without delay. In case you haven't heard me harp on this before, shared use paths are not adequate infrastructure for urban mobility. Putting "bikes on the sidewalk" just shifts the burden of vigilance from cyclists in the road to pedestrians on the path, yet downtown Winooski is an attractive pedestrian destination and a housing hotspot in walking distance to the hospital. All users of our transportation networks should be able to safely use their right-of-way without uneccesary vigilance. And much like fast and wide roads invite more people to drive on them, safe and separated active transportion infrastructure similarly induces demand.

The intersection has its own set of problems that trickle down from the misplaced capacity requirements of the bridge. From the (current) lack of left-turn access out of Mill Street, to the addition of a lane on Colchester Ave (why?), to the ~50-foot pedestrian crossings over four lanes of traffic, the intersection ends up being another lose-lose compromise. By scaling down traffic expectations we would have had more creative design options on the table that could have—counterintuitvely to some—resulted in better mobility options.

To summarize:

• Our stated goal is to shift single-occupancy vehicle transportation mode share to 37% by 2026 (but is up 5% over past 10 years to 58% today)
• Our stated goal is to eliminate ground transportation carbon emissions by 2030
• Our stated goal is to "redesign [...] roads to significantly increase multi-modal transportation"
• The roadway on the bridge will be four to six feet wider than it is today
• A wider bridge will increase average speeds, creating more capacity and demand to drive
• The simplified intersection will facilitate faster navigation, creating more capacity and demand to drive
• A faster roadway will increase the risk of serious injury or death of non-drivers in a collision
• The shared-use active transportation paths will put cyclists and other e-mobility users into conflict with pedestrians

If we could hypothetically start over on the bridge's design today with a target completion date 5-10 years out, I think that it's very likely that it could have been the flag we plant in the future ground laying out our vision for the future of transportation in the region. With a mandate to reduce car traffic and provide viable alternatives to driving, we could imagine a 2-lane bridge with dedicated and seperated pedestrian and cyclist rights-of-way, with a single-lane roundabout intersection that keeps cars moving and people visible and safe. We could, while building the bridge, tie the new traffic patterns into transit-oriented housing development projects on both sides of the river that also help pay into increased transit frequencies, and even use the road diet on Burlington's side to undo the remaining damage of urban renewal in Winooski by allowing them to start planning to dig up the rotary and reconnect their downtown urban fabric.

New housing! Cutting emissions! Funding transit! Shifting transportation behaviors! Growing the tax base in two of Vermont's densest cities! But unfortunately, the time for this dream has passed. We should be under no illusions that any of this would be even remotely on the table if the bridge were to fail. I illustrate this alternative outcome to lead into my final point...

Institutional Failure

We wasted a huge opportunity to turn the (now presumably short-lived) federal investments in transportation infrastructure into a transformational win-win project, and ended up in the lose-lose scenario we are now facing. We did not end up here because nobody advocated for these ideas; the very first public meeting on this design process nearly 15-months ago was filled to capacity at the O'Brien Community Center, with nearly every comment from the public raising the concerns I've covered here. Sharon Bushor, a former Burlington city councilor who was on the advisory committee for the bridge's scoping study, even spoke up to acknowledge that they clearly "got it wrong" after hearing the public response. At the second public meeting a few months later where the public expected to see some of the unanimous feedback from the first meeting incorporated, we saw no changes, and instead encountered a very defensive and dimissive project team. Additional criticism was leveled at the project when it came to the Burlington City Council earlier this year, and then a coalition of transportation advocacy groups made a coordinated effort to get the public demands taken seriously. All of these appeals fell largely on deaf ears, and the only concession made from the original design from Summer 2023 was 3-feet of additional shared-use path on the down-river side of the bridge.

Throughout the process, the appeal to approach this project more creatively was met by resistance and constantly shifting goal posts about why changes couldn't be made. Public engagement done in good faith was met with wild goose chases about bridge width being unchangable or about bike lanes being unplowable. After digging into a concern for long enough to find a compromise, we'd be told that actually there's some other limiting factor and so we still can't make any changes. After enough time had passed where advocates were trying to help solve challenges, the tone shifted to "it's too late now, and you should be grateful to be getting anything at all. Don't risk losing this funding." Many of us who put in considerable work to achieve that win-win outcome are left at the end of this project feeling like our time was wasted, and that we were methodically led down dead end paths to diffuse our energy for improving the project.

This brings me back to the key failure I noted earlier: the project team was not interested in innovation. It did not act like its job was to deliver a transformational piece of $100M infrastructure to Burlington, Winooski, and the State of Vermont, but like its purpose was to defend an infallible scoping study document from a malicious and uninformed public. This is not conspiracy, but part of a well documented and incresingly criticized institutional culture among transportation planning and engineering professionals in North America. This is a core component of the Strong Towns hypothesis of municipal insolvency in the United States, and documented in books with titles like "Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System". (A thought experiment: what is the yearly lifetime amortized cost burden of this new, larger bridge? We're spending every dollar of this "free money" up front, but the feds aren't paying for maintenance. The more we build with that money, the more we're on the hook to maintain in perpetuity.)

I don't think that any of the individuals within the Burlington or Winooski Department of Public Works, CCRPC, VTrans, or any of the consulting firms involved had ill will or bad intent, and I know many of those people well enough to know these are good people. But good people working in good faith can still create bad outcomes. From a bird's eye view, the transportation planning profession itself is what has created the ineffective planning structures and deadly design manuals that kill people and slowly bankrupt cities and towns around the country. The purpose of a system is what it does, and what transportation planning has done over the past few decades is facilitate car-dependence, kill pedestrians and cyclists, and create overwhelming maintenance cost burdens.

This assessment puts policy makers in a tough position because the accusation is that "the expert in the room is causing harm", and yet the gut instinct is to ask said expert if they're causing harm... and if they're doing work they think is correct and in good faith, they're always going to say no. At the same time, while I've seen several city councilors over the years become skeptical of contradictory information and then become critical of the path we're on (for example: why do we keep hearing rosy presentations on mode share shifts when the data clearly shows us moving in the wrong direction?), city councilors cycle through office much faster than transportation planning and engineering staff. Every time a councilor who is pushing for deeper changes leaves office, the slate is wiped clean; the institutional momentum is on the side of the status quo.

So what do we do about it? Federal transportation policy is completely outside of our circle of control, and is most likely about to become even more hostile to infrastructure spending and urban investment overall. The statehouse is similarly hostile to the transportation needs of Vermont's urban areas (again: see GMT), and VTrans is indifferent at best when it comes to the types of goals we are (correctly) setting for ourselves in Burlington. This leaves us with only one option: we need our city staff to have a clear mission to advocate for and work towards our amibitous goals, and be given the freedom to get creative about acheiving them. (There's also the final option of the path we're already on: do nothing and hope our goals reach themselves.)

While much of the most frustrating engagement did not come from city staff members in particular, at the end of the day, Burlington's DPW was our representative in this process to design a bridge and intersection that could have served as keystone infrastructure for this energy and transportation transition period from 2030 to 2050, and they did not rise to that challenge. They had considerable sway over the outcome, but instead participated in pushing against public calls for improvement, and we ended up with something that is hard to be proud of. Again, I don't think this is because of bad intent or incompetance, but because there is an unclear mandate in what DPW's job should be when it comes to transportation infrastructure projects like this. If the assumed mandate was to minimize risk and maximize utilization of federal dollars (as I suspect it is assumed to be), they did a great job. But I argue that this should not be their mission, and in fact is not their mission based on the stated public goals and plans of the city.

The Burlington Department of Public Works' top transportation priority should be to facilitate the transition to a safe, equitable, and convenient multi-modal transportation system (PlanBTV) that can eliminate ground transportation emissions by 2030 (BED NZE 2030). This would mean that, at all stages of a project, DPW would be expected to make data-driven decisions that supports those long term city goals, even if it goes against conventional transportation planning doctrine, and especialy when it means reducing capacity for single-occupancy vehicles while expanding viablity of alternatives. In fact, it will be impossible to reach our mode share target if we don't start dedicating more of our limited space for other transportation modes. Our city staff are intelligent and hardworking people, but we need to give them both the political breathing room and an accountability framework that puts the department on the path toward success as defined by the city—not the transportation planning design manuals. This mission should be made explicit by the Mayor, upheld by the Public Works Commission and City Council when appropriate, and the Director of DPW should be specifically assessed against and held accountable to these goals. Other cities around the country—and the world—are figuring this out and making this transition. We can do this too.

And yes, I know that an update of the city's transportation plan is slated to occur in the next 12-18 months, but no, this goal setting should not wait until then. This mandate should be put in place now, and it should guide the process of updating that transportation plan.

Conclusion

At the top of this letter, I lied. Even after everything I've said, I'm asking you to vote to move the bridge forward. The reality is that if this project doesn't move forward now, there's an unacceptably high chance (low as it may be) that the current bridge falls into the river before we line up funding again. Not because the bridge is about to cave in, but because our next chance to do this better may be very far away. The small wins on safety are better than the active transportation death trap that stands today. But I framed this letter this way because I wanted the council to understand that the lose-lose position we are in with the bridge will continue with the next project if we don't change our approach now. We are going to need new accountability structures if we want to start moving towards a safe, functional, and sustainable transportation system that works for everyone. We need to learn this lesson.

I also wanted to verbalize the frustration with how this project turned out and how much better it could have been, and to illustrate why a vote in favor of this project is still a serious compromise. Part of me still feels like this project failing is the deserved outcome, and that failure would be the only way to actually inspire deep reflection and change. It moving forward is an implicit endorsement of a process that is moving us away from our goals. And to be honest, if the evaporation of large-scale federal infrastructure investment didn't seem imminent, and finances at the state and city level weren't also so tight, failure is what I would be advocating for. But that is our fiscal reality, so I'm not. I ask you to vote yes, but to seriously imagine what it would have meant if it failed as it deserved to, and to act on the changes that failure would have required.

If you do still feel called to vote no, I would say that I hope you would be simultaneously prepared to vigorously push for experimentation with a road diet to two or three lanes on the existing bridge, in an effort to start imagining and prototyping the smaller-scale design alternatives that would work within our transportation goals, climate targets, and financial means.