The Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission is working with the Vermont Department of Transportation to create a transportation improvement plan along the interstate in the state’s most populous county. A virtual meeting was held recently on the draft multimodal recommendations.
Interstate 89 is the only interstate in Chittenden County and the state’s largest city – Burlington.
The planning commission is drafting an intermodal plan for the 37-mile long corridor.
An advisory committee developed six goals to address safety, livable communities, mobility, environmental stewardship, economic vitality and system preservation.
Planning Commission Executive Director Charlie Baker provided an overview of the project and the process. He said a core focus has been the Exit 14 interchange, which leads to Burlington and South Burlington.
“The vision statement talks about the 89 being the Interstate system, main line and interchanges that is safe, resilient, provides for reliable and efficient movement of people and goods in support of state, regional and municipal plans and goals. And we recognize that these vision goals and objectives and implementation actions will need to be monitored and reassessed periodically to assure they address the evolving situation, reinforcing things will change.”
Baker added that considerable time was spent assessing interchange configurations because they are a major component of the transportation plan.
“We took some time to really dig into evaluating interchange possible improvements. We also looked at possible secondary land use growth and that’s kind of the idea if you add capacity or connections into or interchanges into the system you may induce some level of land development in that area. And so we spent some time looking at that.”
Over the past few months a corridor assessment was completed. It included a full corridor evaluation, leading to five so-called bundles for the I-89 corridor. VHB is a transportation planning and engineering firm in Burlington. Managing Director David Saladino said each bundle outlines different investment proposals for the interstate corridor.
“Where we are now is kind of taking those bundles and say how do we move those forward towards implementation with those projects and recommendations. And so that is the implementation plan that will guide this over the next 20 or 30 years, the investments along the corridor.”
An implementation plan will move forward and Baker noted that because they are looking at a 30-year timeframe, it proposes a Corridor Monitoring Committee.
“We’re trying to communicate a system that is flexible and can adapt to what is an unknown future whether it’s a pandemic or technology, autonomous cars, climate change, there’s a lot of unknowns in our future so I think we’re intending for this implementation plan to be a living effort, if you will. Not a document but an actual living effort that does adapt as we learn more things over time.”
