This commentary is by Jonathon Weber of Burlington. He is programs director at Local Motion, Vermont’s statewide advocate for active transportation, vibrant communities, and safe streets.
Around 2:45 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 11, 38-year-old Sean Hayes of Burlington was biking on Shelburne Road near Fayette Drive in South Burlington when an on-duty Shelburne police officer hit and killed Hayes with their cruiser.
The specific circumstances around this crash are not yet known. But there’s a lot that we do know. We know that Sean is the third member of our community to die at or very close to the Fayette Drive intersection since 2019. In December of 2020, Jermee Slaughter was killed while walking when a driver hit them and fled the scene, leaving Jermee in the roadway where they were hit by another driver. In September of 2023, Chriss Zuckerman was killed by a driver while crossing at Fayette Drive. Several other crashes at this intersection have resulted in injuries.
While the Fayette Drive intersection seems to be especially dangerous, all of Shelburne Road from Burlington to Shelburne is dangerous, and especially for people outside of cars. Last March, Joseph Byrd Allen, also known as Byrdman, was hit and killed while biking by a driver who fled the scene. Later that night, a police cruiser parked at the crash site was hit by another driver under the influence, an occurrence notable only because it speaks to the chaos on Shelburne Road.
We know there are numerous causes for each of these crashes, and while human behavior is often blamed, it is an incomplete explanation — and an unhelpful one if we are serious about preventing death. The design of Shelburne Road encourages people to make unsafe choices in cars and on foot or bike, and it deals out severe consequences to those choices in the form of high-speed crashes that are often fatal.
Humans make mistakes, and we will never have safe streets until we design them to be safe even when people make those mistakes. So, while we may be able to point to laws that were broken, be they speeding, driving under the influence, crossing outside of a crosswalk, or biking without lights, we know that in any crash in which a person is hit by a moving car, it is the speed and mass of the car, and the resulting force transmitted in a crash that results in serious injury and death.
No speed, no crash. Less speed, less injury.
We will not save lives if we continue to point at human error and broken laws as reasons to do nothing about infrastructure like Shelburne Road. We must act urgently to address the infrastructural factors that cause such severe consequences when humans make mistakes. Doing so will require reducing the speed of cars on Shelburne Road, improving the safety and convenience of bike and pedestrian crossings, and creating separated and protected bike infrastructure.
Shelburne Road is what’s known as a “stroad” — a street/road hybrid that mixes development with high speed. High speeds can only be safe in a simplified environment like a limited-access highway. When speed is mixed with the complexity and human factors generated by development, the result is an environment where death and serious injury are all too common. And as much-needed housing and other development occurs along Shelburne Road, these tragedies will likely become more common.
There are two ways to make a stroad safe. Either reduce the speed of vehicles, making it more like a street that prioritizes access, or reduce access points to developments and provide completely separated bike and pedestrian infrastructure to create a road that prioritizes through travel. Until we decide to do one or the other, people will continue to die and endure life-changing injuries on Shelburne Road.
Reducing access points to development is difficult and unlikely, so we are calling for an urgent reduction in speed on Shelburne Road. The way to achieve lower speeds is through a road diet, in which the number of driving lanes would be reduced — probably to one through lane in each direction with a center turning lane. The two lanes no longer used for driving could become bike infrastructure and/or dedicated bus lanes, and would result in more appropriate speeds for cars and shorter crossing distances for people walking and rolling.
Of course, some will point out that a road diet on Shelburne Road would cause congestion. The notion that we would forgo life-saving changes in order to save a few minutes for drivers who travel at the busiest few hours of the day is an inexcusable abdication of responsibility. Human lives are more important.
Furthermore, research shows that when roadway capacity for driving is reduced, congestion does not increase. Instead of sitting in ever more traffic, drivers choose other routes, other times, or other ways of getting around. By reducing the number of lanes on Shelburne Road, we can improve those other modes of travel by bolstering bus service and infrastructure, improving crossings, and building safe and protected bikeways.
We call on the Vermont Agency of Transportation, the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission and community leaders in Burlington, South Burlington and Shelburne to empower and convene a taskforce with the mandate of making the infrastructure changes necessary to eliminate fatal and serious injury crashes on Shelburne Road.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Jonathon Weber: We need to reduce the speed of cars on Shelburne Road.