The following is written testimony from Vermont Sierra Club Transportation Team member Karl Kemnitzer of Hartland, Vermont regarding Section 21 of the Transportation Innovation Act, H.522. While we are promoting vehicle electrification we must also look for solutions that are pedestrian and bicycle-friendly. This written testimony was submitted to the Vermont House Transportation Committee.
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Section 21 of House Bill H.552 promoting wider road shoulders, narrower travel lanes, and speed limits/signage is an extremely important step forward for our transportation network. For several decades state transportation agencies have labored under road space allocation guidelines that were advanced for 1950, but it's past time to admit these rules have created a system with very large problems that can not be solved by adding more cars. I urge you to not only pass Section 21, but to go further and make Complete Streets mandatory, and to also rule that VTrans should have a dedicated program for upgrading our roads to be safe and comfortable for all users.
There are good people at VTrans who are trying to do good work, but after a dozen years of ebike advocacy, I'm convinced that they can not see past their standard Level of Service equations for cars. Section 21 is vitally necessary to push them out of this rut- my experience has been that VTrans is incapable of changing this on it's own. Three recent examples of their locked mindset are repavings within the last 5 years of Route 5 and Route 12 in my town of Hartland, and Route 132 in Thetford. Despite the existence of the Complete Streets law, despite protests from people in Thetford, and despite two of these routes connecting the 3 small centers in my town, these roads were repaved with not a single thought for pedestrians or bicyclists. Complete Streets and bike/ped measures are simply not an important consideration for VTrans.
I've now given close to 3000 test rides on my ebikes, and talked with at least twice that many more people at public events and workshops about bicycling. Besides the cost of e-bikes, the other common concern is safety. The majority of bike riders are not in the "Brave and Fearless" category, and widely view our roads as unsafe. This point was a serious flaw in the VTrans On-Road Bicycle Plan which looked at Strava data (i.e. recreational riders) and not Destination Trips (everyday riders). Last year I filed testimony in support of a more complete road design and used an example of a near-death experience I had in Hartford, VT. I compared that car myopic road with another road one half of a mile away in NH carrying more traffic which also has good sidewalks and safe bike lanes. This year I have another needless example when an ABF tractor-trailer passed me a foot away at 40 mph in Windsor while I was riding home with groceries on my bike. Both of these near fatalities happened on Route 5, our main Upper Valley road, and to underscore the stupidity the second one happened a few hundred feet down the hill from the regional VTrans garage. These were supposedly professional truck drivers who thought there was no room on the road for anyone else but them, and with 9 inch wide shoulders there wasn't. None of this is acceptable by any standard.
VTrans has provided us with some high-quality roads for cars, and I'm sure that they have the competency to do the same for other users. However despite the USDOT and the FHWA programs promoting bicycling and walking, the multiple endorsements of Complete Streets, the statements in engineering design manuals that most of the rules are recommendations and not mandatory, the emergence of the global Vision Zero safety campaign in response to the serious flaws in our road design, and the many calls for reducing our VMT, I have seen VTrans continue to emphasize only cars in their projects. They are either incapable of seeing the problem or are willfully ignoring it, and unfortunately, Section 21 is very necessary. There will never be everyday bike riders and pedestrians with our "standard" roads, but our future depends on mitigating the damage that cars have caused. Creating a safe space on our roads for vulnerable users is a relatively easy and low cost first step for VTrans to take towards a sustainable multimodal network.
I urge the committee to pass Section 21 and then go further and both make Complete Streets mandatory and insist that VTrans create a dedicated program for bringing our roads up to acceptable safety and comfort levels for other users.
Sincerely yours,
Karl Kemnitzer, 58 Densmore Hill Road, Hartland, VT