The road was dark and wet when cyclist Sean Hayes was hit and killed by an on-duty police officer in South Burlington earlier this month. Hayes, 38, was towing a trailer as he pedaled south on Shelburne Road just before 3 a.m. on November 11, destination unknown.
His death was the sixth since 2020 along the busy thoroughfare, which is also known as Route 7. That’s nearly half of the 13 bicyclists and pedestrians killed in Chittenden County over the same time frame.
The fatal crash has galvanized transportation activists to push for an overhaul of Shelburne Road, where ongoing development — including of much-needed housing and homeless services — is bisected by high-speed drivers.
The activists want to reduce the number of driving lanes along the suburban stretch of Route 7 from five to three and add bike or bus lanes as part of a larger transformation. That proposal might seem far-fetched for a road that carries more than 30,000 drivers each day, but a quick, life-saving fix may not exist.
In the days following Hayes’ death, Local Motion, a bike-walk advocacy group, began calling for local and state officials to convene a joint task force to reexamine the design of Shelburne Road with pedestrians and cyclists in mind. And a citizen group called Vermonters for People-Oriented Places organized a mass bike ride to a recent Burlington City Council meeting to demand action.
Officials don’t seem eager to take drastic steps, and they point to data that show the stretch, from South Burlington to Shelburne, isn’t among the state’s most dangerous. An analysis by the Vermont Agency of Transportation, for instance, found that most of the serious crashes along Shelburne Road involving pedestrians and cyclists have been caused by intoxication and people disregarding the law rather than road design flaws.
Activists want to reduce the number of driving lanes on Shelburne Road from five to three.
Since 2019, all but one of 10 crashes there involved “unsafe or erratic behavior on the part of the pedestrian or the cyclist,” said Erin Sisson, deputy chief engineer of VTrans’ highway division. Other stretches in the state, such as West Street in Rutland, have much higher rates of crashes involving cyclists and pedestrians, she added.
Shelburne Road “is definitely on the radar, but it hasn’t risen to the high-crash locations where we could have an infrastructure-related impact,” Sisson said.
Yet crash analysis alone misses the bigger conundrum of Shelburne Road, advocates contend. Road users make mistakes “all across our roadway network, on all of our streets, but we don’t see the level of death and fatalities happening anywhere else” in Chittenden County, said Jonathon Weber, Local Motion’s programs director.
Shelburne Road is a particularly dangerous style of corridor that functions as both a busy road and a city street, Weber said; transportation advocates call them “stroads.”
In addition to its importance as a trucking and commuter route, Shelburne Road is a key shopping and residential district. Numerous motels have been converted into emergency shelters and low-income housing there in recent years. Mixed-income apartment buildings are also slated for development, including at the site of a derelict former Pizza Hut near the Interstate 189 interchange and, farther south, a multifamily project known as the Crombach complex.
Opponents of new housing development along Shelburne Road have leveraged traffic safety concerns to make their case. Some pointed to a fatal pedestrian crash in 2022 that killed Nathan Miner as a reason to scuttle the Crombach project. Miner had been crossing Route 7 near his recently constructed Harrington Avenue apartment one night when a driver struck him.
Police determined that Miner was intoxicated at the time, and no charges were filed against the driver. The Town of Shelburne has since paid VTrans to install a flashing crosswalk at the site.
The Crombach project is moving forward after the developers dropped more than 50 of the 115 units they initially proposed. But curtailing development along the corridor because of traffic congestion and poor safety isn’t the solution for a county with a severe housing shortage, Shelburne town manager Matt Lawless said.
“What can’t be the answer is we say no to infill [development] and have sprawl farther out,” Lawless said. “Then people are still driving to Burlington, and they’re driving farther, so the traffic gets worse. That’s been the trap of sprawl throughout our 20th-century history.”
Pedestrians and bicyclists along the busy road, where drivers go 40 miles per hour or much faster, tend to be those without many transportation options.
None was killed along the stretch from 2013 until late 2020, according to VTrans data. But on December 14, 2020, Jermee Slaughter was intoxicated and lying in the road at the Fayette Drive intersection when a woman ran over him and fled the scene. The driver was later arrested on a hit-and-run charge.
Others killed include bicyclist Joseph Allen, a Burlington eccentric known as “Byrdman”; a resident of a nearby mental health facility; and Edwin Mejia, who was struck at night while walking near the homeless motel where he was living on a stretch of Route 7 that has no sidewalk.
Earlier this month, Hayes was traveling south when he was hit and killed by Shelburne Sgt. Kyle Kapitanski, who was traveling in the same direction in a police cruiser. Vermont State Police are still investigating the crash, and Kapitanski is on administrative leave pending its outcome.
Some activists have suggested that Hayes lacked stable housing, and court records reviewed by Seven Days indicate that Hayes told police last summer that he had no place to stay. Hayes’ family did not respond to an interview request.
Shelburne Selectboard chair Michael Ashooh often commutes by e-bike to his job as a University of Vermont lecturer. But he goes out of his way to avoid the main thoroughfare. “It’s scary,” he said. “There’s suddenly no shoulder for bikes. You have to get up on the sidewalk — the sidewalk is dangerous for bikes.”
Biking along the sidewalk is exactly how 54-year-old Bill Kinnear gets to Burlington each morning from his residence at the Beacon Apartments, across the road from the Fayette Drive intersection where Hayes was killed.
“There’s no bike lane out there,” he explained on Monday as he prepared for his 3.5-mile, rush-hour commute to get a free breakfast in Burlington’s Old North End. “I don’t want to have to worry about somebody rear-ending me on Shelburne Road.”
Kinnear, who became homeless and lost his car during the pandemic, moved into the former motel in September. Kinnear likes the location and says cycling gives him some exercise. But local and state governments seem only “half invested” in bike infrastructure, he said.
Kinnear contrasted the lack of bike lanes on Shelburne Road with the protected bike lanes he noticed in parts of Montréal, where medians separate riders from urban traffic.
“You can encourage biking, but you can’t really encourage safety when you got these giant cars riding behind you,” he said.
Kinnear plans to use the bus once the weather dips below 20 degrees, though the budget-strapped Green Mountain Transit system will soon reduce some service along Shelburne Road.
Making any improvements to Route 7 is a complicated, yearslong process. The busiest section of road crosses three municipalities but is largely managed by VTrans. The Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission is beginning a safety study of several intersections along the road in South Burlington, transportation program director Eleni Churchill said in an email. The last comprehensive study of the corridor was completed in 2012.
VTrans doesn’t plan to convene a special task force similar to the one Weber, of Local Motion, is seeking, Sisson said. The process, she said, should start with local planning officials.
But Hayes’ death has led to additional pressure for change. A week after the crash, activists with Vermonters for People-Oriented Places, a citizen group that promotes infill development and multimodal transportation, installed an all-white “ghost bike” memorial where Hayes was killed. A few days later, more than 20 of the activists rode their bikes en masse to a Burlington City Council meeting to demand better bicycling infrastructure, particularly along Shelburne Road. Some parked their bikes inside city hall and testified while wearing fluorescent safety vests. One person held a cardboard sign that read “Paint is not infrastructure.”
Another activist, 26-year-old Marty Gillies, said in an interview that members were upset that Burlington officials were not moving quickly enough to enact their stated goals for improved bike/walk infrastructure.
Hayes’ death also prompted a planned discussion of traffic safety at the Shelburne Selectboard meeting scheduled for Tuesday, November 26, and it was invoked recently at the South Burlington City Council, too.
“We can’t ask people to walk and bike places if they’re getting killed by cars,” Havaleh Gagne, chair of South Burlington’s Bicycle & Pedestrian Committee, told councilors, visibly choked up.
Reimagining Shelburne Road could be akin to opening Pandora’s box, and it remains to be seen whether local and state officials are interested in doing so. In the meantime, activists expect to see more “ghost bikes” along the strip.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Crash Course | Activists want to reshape Shelburne Road after another cyclist is killed in South Burlington”
This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2024.
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