Burlington city council votes to construct Winooski Ave. bike lane
The current Winooski Ave. transportation breakdown lacks a bike lane betwen intersections with Pearl St. & Main St. Courtesy of Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission & City of Burlington.
After 20 long years of talking about bike lanes on Winooski Avenue, action was finally taken. On March 9th, the Burlington City Council voted to add bike lanes on the full length of the corridor, with construction planned to begin in September. Burlingtonians have been advocating for these bike lanes for so long, which brings up the question: Why are bike lanes so important? Why is this bike lane so important?
Winooski Ave. is the only street in Burlington that extends all the way from the South End to the northern edge of the Old North End. Winooski Ave also extends through the downtown with many businesses located on the corridor making it a hub for food, art, and culture. Because of its location and high use, the Winooski Ave. bike lane will have profound safety impacts for everyone, help meet sustainability goals of the city, benefit low income earners, and boost businesses. This will make the Winooski Ave. bike lane the fundamental backbone of the Burlington bike lane network. A larger bike network will create safer streets in Burlington as ridership numbers increase.
Winooski Ave. is the most dangerous road in the city of Burlington. In the past 5 years, 16 percent of bicycle crashes and 17 percent of pedestrian accidents in the entire city have happened on Winooski avenue. A much needed change to the corridor will take place with an increase in safety features like two way dedicated bike facilities, lane reductions, bus bump outs, and mini roundabouts among other safety enhancements.
As a part of our work as an intern with Sustainable Transportation Vermont, we talked to over 100 users of the corridor including pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers. There was a broad consensus amongst cyclists that Winooski Ave. is extremely dangerous, with many refusing to bike on the avenue all together. One cyclist of Winooski Avenue, when asked if they had an unsafe encounter on Winooski Ave. responded, “I think everyone has”. The benefits of the bike lanes go beyond just bikers. Bike lanes reduce the frequency of crashes and calm traffic, which makes streets less chaotic and safe for all users including cars, buses, and pedestrians
Per the City Council’s March resolution, a “road diet” will be implemented on the corridor between Pearl St. and Main St., Winooski Ave. This is a common road improvement where vehicle lanes are reduced from 4 to 3 lanes (two travel lanes and a center turn lane) and dedicated bicycle lanes are added. The benefits of a road diet go beyond the normal benefits of adding bike lanes. A 2013 study showed a 47 percent drop in crashes in small metros like Burlington as a result of road diets. The bike lanes on Winooski Ave. are also a crucial step to help Burlington reach its goal of eliminating fossil fuel use in the ground transportation sector by 2030. The City developed a roadmap to achieve this goal, which includes the need to reduce vehicle miles traveled in Burlington by 15%, largely by increasing the use of alternative forms of transportation. This will not happen without continued actions like the Winooski Ave. bike lane by the City. Studies show that a larger bike network will increase ridership by as much as 171%. We are currently living in a climate crisis so we must act like it by urgently providing the infrastructure for alternative modes of transportation. The Winooski Ave. bike lane is a critical step in that process.
Bike lanes like Winooski Ave. are crucial for low-income families, New Americans, and youth, who disproportionately don’t have consistent vehicle access or share 1 car amongst an entire household. It is estimated that 1,500 households in Burlington have 0 vehicles and 6,730 households share 1 vehicle. For these residents, having safe bike infrastructure isn’t a luxury, it is a necessity.
The Old Spokes Home, a bicycle shop located on the Winooski Avenue corridor, provides subsidized bicycles and bike repair services to many low income Vermonters and new Americans that would otherwise lack a reliable form of transportation. The Old Spokes Home, located on Winooski Avenue, has many customers who rely on cycling as their main form of transportation.
Old Spokes Home spoke to us about some of the customers that rely on bikes as their main form of transportation. One customer is Wally who lives on Hyde Street, works at ECHO, and cannot afford a car so he bikes to work, City Market, and other places around town. There another named Jabari who lives on Nash Place who like many others cannot afford a car, so he relies on his bike to get to his job at the medical center. There is M who goes to BHS and rides her bike to her after school job at Champlain College. All of these people have unique stories but share one common need with many other Burlingtonians: safe cycling infrastructure for transportation around the city.
With the new Winooski Ave bike lane finally coming to Burlington, providing safety for cyclists, environmental benefits, and providing another cheap mode of transportation, it is important to see how the bike lane could possibly impact local business. A concern raised again and again about the addition of bike lanes to Winooski Ave is that the removal of parking will drive away customers and cause businesses along the corridor to lose business. While this is a reasonable concern, there is no evidence that this will happen. In fact, numerous studies show that replacing parking with bike lanes has the opposite effect.
In 2016, a pilot project was launched in Toronto that removed 136 on-street parking lots and replaced them with two-way bike lanes. In addition to studying the impact of these changes, researchers at the University of Toronto and the Center for Active Transportation studied trends along a stretch of road with similar business just a couple miles from the pilot site to keep as the “control” area. The study focused on four things: spending, customer counts, visit frequency, and storefront vacancies. They then conducted an identical study after the parking was removed and found that removing parking and installing bike lanes had no negative impact on businesses, and actually had some positive impacts. Monthly spending rose in the pilot area with more visitors spending over $100 per visit, and in the control area spending did not change. In the pilot they found that the average number of customers rose by 21 percent. In the pilot area customers visited three days more often annually than before. Vacancies remained the same in both the pilot and control area. What they concluded with this study is that bike lanes had no impact in some areas and helped business in other areas.
This holds true not just in Toronto, but in cases all over the world. There is evidence that bike lanes have boosted business in Portland, Oregon, and New York City. Reflecting similar data, an article from the Canadian Broadcasting Organization clearly highlights the benefits bike lanes have on local business. In Manhattan, retail sales along or near a bike lane increased by 49 percent while the rest of Manhattan's sales only rose three percent. The data also indicates that cyclists typically spend more than drivers. Similar results were found in studies from France, Copenhagen, Dublin, Davis, CA and many others.
As the Covid-19 crisis continues to spread across Vermont there will only be more and more Vermonters using our streets for walking and biking. Numbers from other cities across the country demonstrate an uptick in cycling as people are cooped up in their homes for most of the day. As we welcome new riders to the streets, let’s make sure that the streets are safe for them. Winooski Avenue can be a key part of a city-wide effort to keep new cyclists and pedestrians safe once cars begin returning to the road en masse
The Winooski Ave. bike lane can’t come soon enough to bring Burlington some much needed connectivity, safety for cyclists, transition to greener modes of transportation and to reduce emissions, improve accessibility for low-income residents, and boost local businesses. With this project in the works, it opens the door to many more possibilities for bike infrastructure in Burlington. While the crisis continues to loom over us in the coming weeks and months, a safer, more equitable, less pollutive Burlington is something that we can all look forward to on the other side.
