Colchester Bicyclist Injured In Crash With Car

Burlington Free Press
News Brief
May 16, 2008
www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008305160001

COLCHESTER — A bicyclist was injured when she was struck by a car Thursday on Lakeshore Drive, Colchester police said.

Ana Barria, 35, was crossing the intersection of Lakeshore Drive and Prim Road at about 6 p.m. when she was struck by a vehicle driven by Jessie Willis, 29, of Burlington, police said.
Willis told police she was turning left onto Prim Road and did not see the bicycle. Barria was taken to Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington. Police said the injuries did not appear life-threatening.
Willis was cited into court to answer charges of driving with a suspended license.

Witnesses are asked to call Colchester police at 264-5555.

Farrell St. Residents Seek Traffic Fix

Burlington Free Press
by Sarah Buscher
May 14, 2008
www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080514/NEWS02/805140318/1001/NEWS

SOUTH BURLINGTON -- Residents from the city's Eastwoods and Farrell Street neighborhoods lobbied the City Council this month to consider adding a three-way stop to the intersection where Eastwood Drive meets Farrell Street.

The Farrell Street extension was built as part of the high-density residential development comprising Eastwood Commons, O'Dell Apartments and the Grand Way Commons senior living community. Thousands of cars travel from Swift Street to Shelburne Road via the connector daily, and residents worry that the intersection where Eastwood Drive meets Farrell Street with a single stop sign is becoming dangerous for drivers and pedestrians.

Farrell Street originally ran from Hadley Road in the city's Eastwoods neighborhood through to Swift Street. Later, the southern portion of the street from Hadley Road to Joy Drive was posted as one-way, to accommodate traffic traveling out of the Eastwoods neighborhood, while keeping through-traffic from traveling residential streets to access Shelburne Road.

The new Farrell Street extension curves past Eastwood Drive (the portion connecting to Joy Drive and formerly known as Farrell Street), allowing traffic to flow freely from Swift Street to Shelburne Road.

"We've wanted something done at that intersection since the new road was built," said Paul Engels, a 20-year resident of the Eastwoods neighborhood. "We thought it was unsafe from the start."

The problem is not the speed of the cars on the street, but the volume of traffic.

During a two-day study conducted by the city last week, 3,050 cars traveled Farrell Street, and 2,554 of those drivers kept to the posted 25 mph speed limit, averaging 22 mph.

Engels says it's difficult to pull out from Eastwood Drive onto Farrell Street with the steady stream of cars passing in either direction. He also notes the city's recreation path funnels cyclists and pedestrians into a crosswalk nearby.

City data show that five accidents occurred in the area of the new intersection since 2004. City manager Chuck Hafter said that while at least one of the incidents was a confirmed vehicle accident, the data do not describe the nature of the other accidents, which might have happened in surrounding parking areas, and not necessarily at the intersection. No pedestrian accidents have occurred in the area, according to the data; and together, the number of incidents would not warrant a three-way stop at the intersection.

Hafter said he believes the volume of traffic traveling through the area is of concern, however, and would appear to justify a three-way stop.

It's not just a matter of sticking two more signs in the ground, Hafter said. The Metropolitan Planning Organization is looking into the issue and will return to the council with recommendations, likely in June.

Hafter said since the Farrell Street development was built, the city has become more aware of the needs of cyclists and pedestrians.

Engels said he is encouraged that a three-way intersection could become a reality.

Contact Sara Buscher at 651-4811 or sbuscher@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com

It’s “Way to Go! Week,” But Vermont’s Bike/Ped Projects Are Treading Water

Seven Days
By Ken Picard
May 7, 2008
www.7dvt.com/2008/it-s-way-go-week-vermont-s-bike-ped-projects-are-treading-water

Gov. Jim Douglas was talking the talk at last Thursday’s kickoff of the 2008 “Way to Go! Commuter Challenge.” The annual springtime event is meant to encourage Vermonters to incorporate more eco-friendly travel alternatives into their daily commute, such as bicycling, walking, carpooling and public transportation.

Surrounded by five Vermont mayors and fifth-graders from Union Elementary School in Montpelier, Douglas signed a pledge to “make smart, healthy travel choices” this week, just as nearly 2000 other Vermont commuters did during last year’s challenge.

The event, which runs through May 9, is good for the environment, good for the economy and good for our wallets, Douglas told a crowd of 80 people in the Christ Church pocket park in Montpelier. Organizers predicted that in one week alone, the commuter challenge will cut private vehicle usage by 600,000 miles, rid the air of a half-million pounds of greenhouse gases, and save Vermonters $100,000 in travel expenses. “Vermont is the greenest state in America,” Douglas said. “That was in Forbes’ magazine, so it must be true.”

Must be. But asked afterwards how he intends to “go green” to work this week, Douglas was a bit more cagey. Clearly, cycling to the Statehouse from his home in Middlebury was out of the question — though his Secretary of Transportation, Neale Lunderville, said he planned to bike to work from Burlington at least once this week, an 80-mile round-trip pedal.

Take the bus, governor? Sorry, he said, but it’s impractical for him to spend an hour riding north to Burlington only to head south again for another 45 minutes. Carpooling? He’d have to check his schedule. The governor did point out that he switched from his predecessor’s vehicle, an SUV, to his current ride, a Chevy Impala, but couldn’t say what kind of gas mileage the car gets. “I know it’s better than an SUV.”

Perhaps Douglas can be forgiven for not taking advantage of the limited transit options between Middlebury and Montpelier. But that’s the whole point, say bike and pedestrian advocates. They complain that when it comes to transportation spending in next year’s budget, neither Douglas nor the legislature is devoting enough to alternative modes of transportation all year round.

“What direction do you want Vermonters to go in the future?” Nancy Schulz, executive director of the Vermont Bicycle and Pedestrian Coalition, said last week. “If we really believe that obesity is a problem, if we really believe that global warming is a serious problem, and fuel prices and health-care costs and traffic congestion and parking shortages . . . then you can’t say that you care about all these issues and do what you’re doing to bike/ped. They just don’t jive.”

Schulz and other bike/ped activists did celebrate one small victory late last week. A legislative conference committee removed a provision from a bill that would have frozen all future bike/ped projects under the federal “enhancement grant” program. The state hasn’t been accepting applications for new bike/ped projects under that program since 2004, when, according to Lunderville, it was determined that there were already enough projects in the pipeline to last until 2013.

But administration officials also say that while funding for bike/ped projects is down slightly this fiscal year — $5.5 million in 2009 versus $6 million in the 2008 budget — transportation dollars are tight all around.

“We have to focus on those things that we can’t live without, like bridges,” Lunderville said. “Which is not to say that bike and pedestrian projects aren’t important. But they’re part of the overall matrix of what we’re doing.”

Moreover, as Lunderville pointed out, many of the road and bridge projects being done by the Vermont Department of Transportation incorporate upgrades and improvements that benefit cyclists and pedestrians, but aren’t necessarily captured in the statistics, such as the $12 million for shoulder widening and sidewalk repairs. “I do a lot of biking myself,” Lunderville added, “and the difference between 1 foot and 3 feet of shoulder can make a world of difference.”

Currently, the state has nearly $39 million “in the pipeline” for future bike and pedestrian upgrades, asserted VTRANS spokesman John Zicconi, not including the $5 million federal “Safe Route to School” program to build infrastructure so kids can walk or bike to school.

“Somewhere out there people are getting the impression that we’re stopping bike/ped projects,” Zicconi noted, “and that’s just not the case.”

Homeless Man Gets a Lift from Burlington Samaritans

Seven Days
By Mike Ives
April 30, 2008
http://www.7dvt.com/2008/homeless-man-gets-lift-burlington-samaritans

In the fall of 2006, Rusty Gould landed on Church Street and requested a bed at the Committee on Temporary Shelter (COTS) Waystation. When the weather turned, he threw a tent in his bike trailer, pedaled out of town and set up camp in the woods.

Gould was planning to do the same this year — until a Nissan sedan jumped the curb and smashed his rig, which was chained to a fence, outside of COTS’ King Street Daystation.

Carrie Baker, a customer service rep who works in a building overlooking the Daystation, glanced out her window around 4 p.m., April 11, and “caught something gold swerve up onto the curb,” she recalls. “I looked out, and there was Rusty’s wagon. I watched it collapse.”

Outraged at the “evil deed,” Baker asked the SkiRack on Main Street for help with Gould’s trailer. But technicians there said it was too mangled for salvage. So Baker collected $169 from her colleagues and donated it to Local Motion, a nonprofit on the Burlington waterfront that outfits low-income residents with discounted cycling gear.

With the help of volunteers from IBM and Citizens Bank, Local Motion supplied Gould with a brand-new trailer and affixed the salvageable parts from his smashed bike to a new, navy-blue frame. He picked up the new rig last Friday. “Local Motion was great, man,” Gould said Sunday evening while smoking a pipe outside the Church Street Waystation.

Gould, 55, is a Vietnam veteran who has lived and biked all over the eastern seaboard. He arrived in Vermont after cycling most of the way from Portland, Maine, by way of New Hampshire, western New York and Maryland. A tree specialist and artist who used to run a nursery, he spends most days “panhandling” for spare change, which he uses to buy soda or tobacco.

On Sunday, Gould’s new bike and trailer were parked outside the Waystation. A plastic shopping bag hung from the handlebars, and a milk crate held a 2-liter soda bottle. The yellow trailer was stuffed with an olive-green tent.

As the sun set on the waterfront, Gould recalled that he was having lunch in the Daystation when his bike and trailer were flattened. It’s not easy being homeless on a bike, Gould said. If you leave your ride in front of the Waystation, he said, it’ll be stolen. If you camp at North Beach, city park officials will confiscate your stuff while you’re gone.

“People presume that homeless people are bums, and it’s not true,” Gould said in between puffs on his pipe. “I’m not a drunken bum. I’m a disabled vet.”

Editorial Page Comic

Local Motion Launches New Trail Service

Published: Friday, April 25, 2008
By Lauren Ober
Free Press Staff Writer
www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080425/LIVING/804250305/1004

Nearly every day, an out-of-stater looking to visit Burlington calls one of the local bike shops and ask what trails to ride. The employees are accommodating and send the tourists in the direction of the Waterfront bike path or one of the many mountain bike trials in the county.

But in our digital world, where seemingly everything we need to know is a mouse-click away, directions over the phone just don't seem to cut it. Those looking for information want the one-stop shopping convenience of the Internet.

Local Motion, an area bicycling advocacy group, understood that people needed an up-to-date trail resource. After three years in development, the organization recently launched Trail Finder, a comprehensive Web-based mapping system of all the public recreation trails in Chittenden County. The launch appropriately coincided with Earth Day.

Up until now, no such resource existed on the Web for trails in Chittenden County. There were piecemeal trail guides on various municipal and mountain biking Web sites, but there were no sites that compiled all the trails in the county. A comprehensive Web resource like this was essential for the recreational future of the region, said Chapin Spencer, executive director of Local Motion.

"It seemed from every angle the critical thing to do," Spencer said. "Residents were asking for it and we realized we needed to take the bull by the horns."

The mission of the Trail Finder project is three-fold, Spencer said. This free service makes the community healthier, strengthens the local tourism economy and helps better connect the trails in the county to achieve a true regional network, he said.

To develop such a labor-intensive project, Local Motion needed the services of an Internet-savvy young person, so they hired Todd Taylor fresh out of University of Vermont. Taylor was charged with coordinating the efforts of 50 volunteers and 40 community partners to map the trails and make the site user-friendly.

Over the past three years, bands of volunteers have ridden, walked, cross-country skied and snowshoed every public trail in the county while taking GPS readings, snapping photos and writing down notable features of the trails. Because there is no real county government, the Local Motion folks had to work directly with each individual town to find the trails.

The $25,000 project was funded largely with grants from the Chittenden County Metropolitan Planning Organization, as well as the Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation's Vermont Recreation Trails Program and donations from Local Motion members. Spencer said the price tag was cheap when compared with the $2,500 they spend each year printing just one of the many trail route maps they provide.

The site is about as user-friendly as the Internet can get. Simply type in the name of a town and find out all the trails there. Or click on the drop-down menu to search by trail use.

A quick search of Williston brings up six trails whose uses range from gentle cross-country skiing to strenuous mountain biking. Each of the trail listings comes with directions to the trailhead as well as a description of the terrain. The listings also provide contact information for the trail managers and a place for users to comment on the trails.

The Trail Finder project couldn't have come at a better time, says Tom Torti, president of the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce. With tourism expected to grow substantially this summer, Torti says the Web site will prove invaluable for visitors looking to participate in recreational activities in the area.

"We are very excited about this program. We can promote it and sell it, and it'll be a huge boon for this area," Torti said.

The SkiRack in Burlington, which has underwritten part of the Trail Finder cost, is one of those bike shops where tourists come to get trail information. People are always coming in asking where to ride, says Spike Clayton, one of the co-owners of the shop. Clayton sees the Web site not only as an important community resource, but also as a good investment of their marketing dollars.

"I'm wowed at what's at people's fingertips," Clayton said. "We're totally excited about it."

The maps on the current Trail Finder site (www.localmotion.org/trails) are only the first phase of the project. The organization has recently received funding to start the second phase of the initiative, which will include mapping on-road cycling routes around the county and off-road cycling routes beyond Chittenden County. Taylor, who designed the mapping system, says this resource was totally unique in the state.

"This covers the whole breadth," Taylor said. "We think it will be really popular."
Contact Lauren Ober at 660-1868 or lober@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com
On the Web: www.localmotion.org/trails

Squashing The Cycle

Times Argus
April 24, 2008
By Sarah Hinckley Times Argus Staff

www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080424/NEWS01/804240389/1032

MONTPELIER – Moving at a slow, deliberate speed, the metal crusher evoked groans and high-pitched squeals from the bicycles being tortured and crushed within its jaws.

"This is how bikes sound when they're screaming," said Carrie Baker, an employee of Onion River Sports, photographing the carnage.

She was on hand to capture the "sculptcycle" creation of artists Lochlin Smith and Ward Joyce as it came together – literally. Early Wednesday morning approximately 30 decrepit bikes were crushed into a 600-pound cube at Bolduc Auto Salvage in Middlesex.

Although it sounds like a new flavor of Hood's frozen treats, SculptCycle is a project hosted by the Montpelier Downtown Community Association. Smith and Joyce are two of 20 artists selected to create sculptures using recycled bicycle parts.

They have not come up with a name for their piece, one of two they are crafting, which will be displayed at the Rialto Bridge in downtown Montpelier, next to Capitol Grounds. The men came up with their crushing idea during a brainstorming session and pitched it to the owner of the salvage yard, who was happy to help out.

"We're just imagining a piece that looks like a Jackson Pollack painting in metal," said Smith, as the machine mangled the multi-colored frames. "It's either going to look like a total piece of junk or it's going to be cool."

The crushing machine, usually used to compact aluminum, has the capacity to crunch 2,200 pounds per square inch. It took several crushing sessions to compact all of the bicycles into the cube weighing over a quarter of a ton.

"It's pretty tough steel," Joyce commented, standing in what looked like a bicycle graveyard. "There's something creepy about destroying toys."

An initial SculptCycle unveiling will take place on June 6, with an official tour of all pieces taking place the following day. SculptCycle culminates with an auction for sculptures on Oct 4.

Other related events are scheduled during that time, including a bicycle film series, an environmental lecture series and 'meet the artist' activities. To find out more information about the SculptCycle, go to www.sculptcycle.org.

Rob Hitzig, another artist and chairman of the SculptCycle committee, brought a green frame with him to the salvage yard on Wednesday.

"I've been doing my own sculptcycle and this is a part I had left over," said Hitzig, who has crafted a robot-like man and two dogs, using wood and bicycle parts, called The Dogwalker. "I've gone through several bikes. As the design changed, I had to focus on certain parts."

The Web site for the event highlights the artists' creations and conceptual designs, and gives an idea of what parts of the bike are being employed in the sculptures.

Some of the artists were getting nervous about having to weld their sculptures, said Hitzig. But he and others have proven there are a number of creative methods that do not involve a hot flame. One artist crafted a basket with the frame made from bike wheels, with tires and tubes woven through them.

SculptCycle is a creative way to recycle bicycles that are in need of serious repair or have become defunct. According to Hitzig and wife Mary Jo Krolewski, there are plenty to choose from for creating a sculptcycle.

"We could do this project every year for the next 10 years and not run out of bikes," said Hitzig, who co-owns the Lazy Pear Gallery.

Contact Sarah Hinckley at sarah.hinckley@timesargus.com