Pine Street Coalition and VT Racial Justice Alliance receive joint Transit Equity Day award by VT Sierra Club Chapter

***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE*** 4 February 2021 FOR MORE INFORMATION: Tony Redington, Coordinator Steve Goodkind Pine Street Coalition bludriver@aol.com 802-343-6616 802-316-6045 tonyrvt99@gmail.com Pine Street Coalition and Vermont Racial Justice Alliance Receive Transit Equity Award for Champlain Parkway Environment Justice Fight Burlington. VT. -- The Vermont Chapter of the Sierra Club today issued its first Transit Equity Award to the Pine Street Coalition and the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance for their collaborative work fighting the Champlain Parkway highway project in Burlington on environmental justice grounds. The award is part of the Sierra Club’s Transit Equity Day taking place on Rosa Parks’ birthday to highlight the need to transition to more environmentally-sound transportation including increased public transit. The Pine Street Coalition is a grass-roots group advocating for safer, greener transportation, particularly for bicyclists and pedestrians, in Burlington’s vibrant South End. The Vermont Racial Justice Alliance is an advocacy organization focused on dismantling racism in Vermont with a priority on public policy regarding housing, education, employment, and criminal justice. The two groups intersected over the City of Burlington’s plan to run the Champlain Parkway highway project through the middle of the Maple-King neighborhood, increasing traffic volume and speed through this predominantly Black and immigrant community. “The City’s own numbers state that their project would decrease traffic in the predominantly white, more affluent neighborhoods further south, but at the expense of increasing traffic in the Maple King neighborhood by 37 percent. More traffic and higher speeds significantly increase the safety risk to people walking and biking in this neighborhood, especially children and elders,” says Tony Redington, coordinator of the Pine Street Coalition and a prior transportation planner and policy analyst in Vermont and New Hampshire. The Pine Street Coalition filed a federal lawsuit in 2018 to stop the Champlain Parkway. Among their challenges to the project was environmental justice. The Federal Highway Administration agreed with the Coalition’s contention that environmental review had not fulfilled requirements to analyze the project’s effects on non-White and lower-income residents. The federal court case was put on hold so that the City could evaluate environmental justice impacts. Coordinating with the Racial Justice Alliance as well as Fortieth Burlington, LLC, owner of Innovation Center office complex on Lakeside Avenue, the Pine Street Coalition engaged expert witnesses from Burlington’s academic community and submitted substantial comments detailing the racial harm inherent in the City’s highway design. “As a matter of public policy, undesirable public works are often shifted to low- income neighborhoods as the path to least resistance in overcoming public objection,” said Pine Street Coalition expert Lionel Beasley, professor of Race and Media at Champlain College. “The decision to extend the Champlain Parkway along Pine Street to the Maple-King neighborhood represents the continuation of long-standing patterns that trace their origins to Urban Renewal programs and the placement of highways beginning in the late 1940s.” The City’s highway design “smacks of racism” according to retired Burlington City Engineer Steve Goodkind. “If there is any doubt about this, just imagine if the situation was reversed and downtown and affluent neighborhoods were being asked to accept greater traffic volumes in order for traffic to be reduced in the King/Maple/Pine neighborhood. There’s not a chance in hell of that happening, and we all know why,” he said. Working with the Racial Justice Alliance and Fortieth Burlington, owner of the Innovation Center on the Parkway’s path, the Pine Street Coalition developed a solution called the Champlain RIGHTway, a re-routed alternative to the Parkway which would bring traffic relief to the Maple-King community as well as more affluent South End neighborhoods, while increasing safety, decreasing environmental impacts, and costing far less. The Racial Justice Alliance, with support from the Pine Street Coalition and Fortieth Burlington, presented the Champlain RIGHTway proposal to state and federal officials three weeks ago, who have as of yet failed to respond to their demands for environmental justice. The Sierra Club granted the award acknowledging the unique collaboration between Pine Street Coalition and the Racial Justice Alliance because it “believes that these types of partnerships are what is needed to challenge systemic racism and institutional poor transportation planning.” www.SafeStreetsBurlington.com https://www.facebook.com/SSBPineStreetNOW Stop Transportation Racism! Redesign the Champlain Parkway!