STOWE, Vt. - In the perpetual battle over how to stop trucks and buses from getting stuck in the narrow, rocky outcroppings of Smugglers’ Notch along one of the most scenic roads in New England, Vermont officials think they’ve found a way to win the war: chicanes. Chicanes are curb extensions typically used to discourage speeding by forcing vehicles to follow a curving, S-shaped path. In the case of the iconic Notch road, the chicanes are a combination of plastic barrels and rubber curbing that are fashioned to mimic the hairpin curves that snare trucks and buses like a spider web traps flies. If a vehicle is too long or bulky to navigate its way through the chicanes, then its driver is expected to turn around. “Don’t fit here? You won’t fit ahead,” a yellow warning sign reads. The 3.5-mile stretch of Route 108 that rises and falls on the side of Mount Mansfield is a sometimes steep, twisting road connecting Stowe and Cambridge and the ski resorts at both ends. In mountainous terrain, it snakes between rock outcroppings, at some points dropping down to a single lane. Glorious views of forests and waterfalls made it Vermont’s first officially designated Scenic Highway and draw hordes of sightseers. But when long trucks or buses try to navigate the road — led there by GPS or perhaps tempted by a short route around the mountain — trouble often follows. So many get wedged between the rocks each year that it has become a regional joke. Traffic gets backed up for miles and lasts for hours while crews do the difficult and expensive work of extraction. Steep fines for getting stuck and other measures weren’t doing much to stop the problem, so the state decided to embark on a two-year experiment, installing the temporary chicanes at each end of the road. The results were startling. Between 2009 and 2021, an average of eight vehicles got stuck in the Notch every year. An increase in signs, road markings, and even a blinking portable billboard that flashed, “Your GPS is wrong,” got the average down to five over the last few years. But when the Notch road closed for winter in late November, state officials were rejoicing that only one vehicle, a tour bus, got stuck this year. And even in that case, officials said, it was more a case of driver error than the vehicle being too long or wide to navigate the harshest twists and turns. The driver was able to extricate the vehicle without a cumbersome, and expensive, tow or an hours-long traffic jam. The prospect of vehicles getting stuck on the Notch road is as much a part of local culture and idiom as “Storrowing,” in which too-tall trucks regularly get wedged underneath the low bridges of Boston’s Storrow Drive, despite plenty of warning signs. The Vermont Agency of Transportation, or VTrans, even coined a word for the phenomenon: stuckage. The Rotary Club in Stowe raised money for its scholarship fund by taking bets on what day and time the first stuckage of the year would occur. State officials say that the problem dates back at least to the mid-1990s, and that it got increasingly worse as GPS technology became more common, emboldening drivers to take the shortest route without regard to their vehicle’s size or maneuverability. In recent years, the state increased penalties for drivers, and legislators even filed a bill that would fine GPS providers who recommended the route to those with oversized vehicles. While resisting the urge to declare victory, Todd Sears, the VTrans official who has spent much of his professional life trying to figure out how to solve the puzzle of the Notch road, said the results of the chicanes are very encouraging. “We’re going to use the chicanes again next year and see where we are,” said Sears. “It isn’t a permanent installation. We wanted the flexibility to move things around if the geometry wasn’t working. We’re very encouraged by what we saw this year.” Things didn’t start out so encouraging, though. Two days after the chicanes were installed and the road was opened in May, a tractor-trailer truck driver avoided the chicane at the northern side of the Notch in Cambridge by driving into the oncoming left lane. Luckily, a crew from the state’s Agency of Natural Resources was working on the mountain and flagged the driver down before he got stuck further up the road. Troopers at the Vermont State Police barracks in Williston used to sigh and shake their heads when the radios in their cruisers would crackle with requests for help with yet another clueless truck driver stuck in the Notch. The station commander, Lieutenant Cory Lozier, said the latest mitigation effort is encouraging. “In our opinion, the chicanes have already been a huge success,” Lozier said. George McRae, who owns McRae Truck & Auto in Milton, Vt., has probably pulled more trucks and buses out of the Notch road than anybody else over the years. He’d earn anywhere from $3,500 to $5,000 a pop, charged to the driver, depending on how long and complicated the extraction was. But he’s more than happy to lose the stuckage business. “Kind of hoping that it’s over,” McRae said. “It’s fun to talk about, and I made a lot of money up there, more than anybody. But I’m 68 years old now. I don’t like flapping my wings just to feel the breeze. I like to see things get fixed.” McRae was one of those who recommended that state officials install chicanes in the first place. He saw how effective a version of them were in his long career in stock car racing, when chicanes were used to slow down drivers on the track. Seth Jensen, deputy director at the Lamoille County Planning Commission, said McRae and some officials at VTrans pushed the chicane idea during a community-wide brainstorming effort that brought together state officials, environmental and recreational organizations, and local stakeholders, including the ski resorts at Stowe and Smugglers’ Notch, to figure out a way to end the stuckage. “It was important to take everyone’s consideration into account,” Jensen said. For example, a lot of contractors who live on the north side of the mountain but work regularly in Stowe needed to be able to use the Notch road. If the chicanes prove just as successful next year, state officials may install permanent ones. Jensen said anything permanent would “match the aesthetic aspect of the Notch.” The members of the business community on both sides of the Notch is heartened by the prospect of the chicanes eliminating an annual headache, although the Rotary Club in Stowe has lost a fundraising mechanism. Rich Litchfield, the Rotary president, said the club sold $6,000 worth of chances guessing when the first vehicle would get stuck in 2023. This year, with the chicanes in place, they sold only $600 in chances. “I don’t think we’ll do it again,” Litchfield said.
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