Barriers meant to prevent truck stuckages at Smugglers Notch get tested right away - VTDigger

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by the News & Citizen on May 23.

The chicanery in Smugglers Notch continues.

It seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that, no matter what signs, fines or impediments the Vermont Agency of Transportation may put against them, some tractor-trailer truck driver will still end up stuck in the Notch.

The agency installed temporary chicanes on both the Stowe and Cambridge entrances to the Notch in May, delaying the opening of the road until last week.

The chicanes are low-height barriers that purposefully mimic the tight curves found at the summit of the road to ensure that the drivers who annually find themselves ensnared in the narrow passage, sometimes blocking the road for hours, will now find themselves obstructed in an area where they can more easily turn around.

That was the plan, anyway.

On May 16, two days after the Notch Road opened for the season, a tractor-trailer truck driver — despite the chicanes, despite the signs warning them to turn back, despite the threat of hefty fines — drove past the new barriers from the Cambridge side onto a road forbidden to big rigs.

How did the driver do it? Apparently by simply driving around the chicanes in the left lane, according to the Agency of Transportation.

Luckily, the truck didn’t get far before it was flagged down by Agency of Natural Resources employees who were on the mountain. So, technically, the driver and their truck didn’t get stuck. Transportation officials are also calling it a wash when it comes to gauging the chicane’s efficacy.

“We really don’t know if the chicane worked because the (tractor-trailer truck) didn’t encounter it,” said Todd Sears, deputy director of operations and safety at the agency.

Sears added that the system was designed during this pilot year to be adaptable and to allow the agency to alter it on the fly as it sees how the chicanes work in practice.

“We saw this truck do what it did, we sent investigators to the chicanes to see if there was anything that we could improve upon to better inform/deter motorists,” Sears wrote in an email. “Consequently, we made adjustments to signage, essentially making the route that the vehicle should take clearer.”

Sears led the project to install chicanes in the Notch after the agency spent years conducting traffic analyses and gathering data as the road’s stuck-truck problem grew through the 2010s as more truckers came to rely on GPS technology that routed them through the mountain passage.

In a letter to the Stowe Selectboard in 2021, Secretary of Transportation Joe Flynn said that 92 trucks had been stuck in the Notch since 2009, about 8.4 trucks per year. Twelve trucks were stuck in the Notch each year in 2013, 2014 and 2017.

Efforts from the state have been met with a decreasing number of stuck trucks. Just five were recorded in 2022 and 2023, and six in 2021.

While the agency considered multiple options for thwarting truck drivers before they entered the Notch, including strategically placed roundabouts and height-restrictive archways, Sears and the agency decided to test out chicanes, news which the News & Citizen broke last fall.

At a presentation to the Cambridge Historical Society in Jeffersonville before the Notch opened, Lamoille County Planning Commission planner Seth Jensen, who oversaw parking lot renovations in the Notch last summer, emphasized that, if the current iteration of the chicanes is successful, any permanent installation would be constructed with materials that are more harmonious with the area’s natural aesthetics.

From the outset, Sears has emphasized the prototype chicane’s malleability based on how the drivers interact with them. Though the chicanes have been altered after this first truck showed how easily they can be bypassed by a committed driver, Sears thinks it will prove to be an outlier.

“We are only less than a week into the Notch opening, and the chicanes are new, so it will take some time to assess,” Sears said. “We’ll be more ready to make an assessment at the end of the season. If we get data showing that a (tractor-trailer truck) made it up to the chicane, couldn’t make it through and therefore backed up and turned around, we’d consider that good news: The chicane was effective as designed.”

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