All tagged Community

Interview with Amy Seidl

Interview with Amy Seidl

Anthony LaSalle
energy, Community

The University of Vermont (UVM) is regarded by many as an eco-friendly university. Every undergraduate student is required to take a course relating to environmental sustainability and the Princeton Review ranked UVM within the top 5 green colleges in the nation four consecutive years from 2017 to 2020. While the university might be making an impact on its campus, the state of Vermont still struggles with sustainable transportation. Transportation is estimated to account for 40% of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, making up the largest share of any sector, according to the Vermont Agency of Transportation. As Vermont looks forward, electric vehicles (EVs) will undoubtedly play a large role in the state’s effort to minimize its carbon footprint, but if the energy used to power these vehicles is still being generated through burning fossil fuels, EVs are still resulting in emissions down the line.

Amy Seidl, Co-Director and Senior Lecturer of the Environmental Program at UVM, has been using renewable energy collected from her roof-top solar to work around this issue. Living in a house off-the-grid has allowed her and her family to charge their one fully electric and their one hybrid vehicle directly using the electrons that their solar panels capture for almost 8 months out of the year.

Nicole Losch: 16 Years of Building a Better Burlington

Nicole Losch: 16 Years of Building a Better Burlington

Cate Phypers
planning & design, Community

Sixteen years ago, Nicole Losch entered the Department of Public Works in Burlington to work a part time position coordinating small bike projects and managing trash haul licenses. This Friday, she finishes her decade and a half career with DPW as a pioneer of Burlington’s walk and bike infrastructure.

Nicole Losch has worked her way up through several positions at Burlington’s DPW to her present-day position of Senior Transportation Planner. Roughly five years into her time with DPW, she took over as Transportation Planner. “That’s really when we started to shift bike and ped planning away from any other transportation,” Nicole remembered. Today, this branch of the DPW is seventeen employees strong and continues to do incredible work for the city of Burlington.

Intern Profile: Victoria Peguri

Intern Profile: Victoria Peguri

Hanna Hartman
Community, planning & design, infrastructure

This semester, Victoria Peguri worked as an intern for the Burlington Walk Bike Council. The Walk Bike Council is a citizen group dedicated to improving Burlington infrastructure for walking and biking. They are collaborating with Local Motion, a non-profit advocacy group, to evaluate Burlington’s progress on the official city plan for walk/bike projects. She has been interpreting data from progress over the last five years to create a Five-Year Progress Report. This work “entails going through a lot of data, putting it into graphs, and trying to understand what it means,” said Victoria in our conversation on Saturday morning. This data includes comparing the number of mileage of bike lanes that have been built in Burlington to the number that the Council hoped to achieve in the last five years. They also have investigated sidewalk mileage, but there were not many built.

Intern Profile: McKenzie Kelly

Intern Profile: McKenzie Kelly

Hanna Hartman
Community, planning & design

McKenzie Kelley spent the semester interning as a research analyst for the University of Vermont’s Office of Sustainability. In this role, she has done both data collection and data analysis. She is a computer science and biology double major with a minor in statistics.

The primary projects she worked on are focused on making campus more walkable.

Abby Bleything, the Sustainable Transportation Program Manager at the Office of Sustainability, is McKenzie’s supervisor. In McKenzie’s internship, the day-to-day work looks like lots of spreadsheets and some fieldwork, especially if the weather is good. Her projects include analyzing the energy efficiency of university-owned vehicles.

Intern Profile: Hannah Fleming

Intern Profile: Hannah Fleming

Hanna Hartman
Community, environment

Hannah Fleming is an intern on the Sustainable Transportation Vermont (STVT) communications team, where she co-manages the Instagram account, @SustainableVT, among other tasks. She is a junior at the University of Vermont, studying environmental studies in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources with minors in political science and business administration. She is passionate about environmental change and sustainability policy.

Promote Sustainable Transportation on Green Up Day 2022

Promote Sustainable Transportation on Green Up Day 2022

Ian Bailey
environment, Community

Green Up Day 2022 falls on May 7th. There is less than a month to round up a group of friends, grab a trash bag, and choose a sidewalk or pathway you want to keep beautiful!

Cleaning up trash locally encourages walking. Walking is the most sustainable form of transportation because it only requires your own two feet. People want to walk more when they enjoy the spaces they travel in. Would you like to see piles of empty beer cans, old tires, and lost facemasks all along your journey? Pedestrians are more likely to choose the path that is cared for and vibrant.

A Brand New Face for the Old Spokes Home

A Brand New Face for the Old Spokes Home

Cate Phypers
environment, Community

Jon Copans, a Brattleboro native, has recently taken over as Executive Director at the Old Spokes Home in the North End. I sat down with him to chat about the new role and his passion for the bicycle.

Jon has always loved biking, and has been drawn to the sport forever. “Bikes are the thread that has run throughout my life,” he said. “[They are] incredibly elegant, simple, and efficient machines.” As he spoke, his eyes lit up with excitement. He continued on, speaking about the ways bikes connect people, and how people-centered, rather than car-centered, infrastructure is an incredibly important objective. “ A community where [people] are a priority is by definition, a more fun, more livable, more dynamic place to be,” he explained.

Net Zero: Towards a Carbon-Neutral Vermont

Net Zero: Towards a Carbon-Neutral Vermont

Hanna Hartman
Community, planning & design, environment

Net Zero Vermont is committed to providing paths to a carbon neutral future in the Green Mountain State. Their mission “is to encourage people to adopt a shared vision for a sustainable future, meaning to re-localize, re-direct, and leverage the necessary resources to build model sustainable towns and cities across Vermont and beyond.” Debra Sachs has a long history of sustainability work in the state and graduated from the University of Vermont twice with degrees in forestry and natural resource planning. Sachs is co-founder of the non-profit that is now Net Zero Vermont in the mid-90s as Community Climate Action.

Car Convenience over Pedestrian Safety: VTrans Values Traffic Speed over Safety of School Children

Car Convenience over Pedestrian Safety: VTrans Values Traffic Speed over Safety of School Children

Cate Phypers
infrastructure, Community, planning & design

The difference between 25 and 30 miles per hour to a driver is nothing. To a biker, this could be the difference between life and death, according to AAA. However, this doesn’t seem to be a concern to the Vermont Agency of Transportation.

A recent speed limit update has been added to the entirety of Route 116 (Hinesburg Road), reducing the posted speed limit from 35 to 30 miles per hour after years of studies and requests from the city of South Burlington, according to the city’s website. While this is a win, South Burlington’s goal was a reduction down to 25 miles per hour. This may not seem like a large difference, but according to a 2011 study by AAA, the risk of severe injury by impact for a pedestrian is 25% below 25 miles per hour and doubles to 50% at just 31 miles per hour.