A yellow-clad road worker flagged a dozen cars to a stop last Thursday while excavators gouged out soil and shrubbery along the east side of Route 7 in Charlotte. The vehicles waited in the spring drizzle for approximately seven minutes. Such delays have become familiar to regular commuters as a $20 million,three-mile road reconstruction and shoulder-widening project stretches into its second summer. The holdups are a temporary inconvenience. But the physical changes to the route through pastoral Chittenden County are permanent. Hundreds of trees have been felled and stretches of private land bulldozed to widen the corridor so that it looks less like a narrow country byway and more like what it really is: a commuter highway that carries 13500 cars a day through Charlotte. The work is widening the ribbon of asphalt from roughly 28 feet to 42 feet but there will still be just two lanes, one northbound and one southbound. What's changing are the road shoulders, or where drivers can pull over for the cops or to change a flat tire. These will expand from narrow strips barely vast enough to accommodate a bicycle to eight-foot-wide ones to comply with federal highway safety standards. Half of the project is already done,from the Ferrisburgh-Charlotte town line north to State Park Road, which leads to Mount Philo. The remaining section, and now under construction,will terminate just before the biggest intersection in town, at Ferry Road, and where people turn off Route 7 to catch a boat to Essex,N.
Y. The project is on budget and on schedule for completion in July 2018, according to Vermont Transportation Agency project manager Ken Upmal. But not everybody is applauding it. "They spent a lot of money on this thing that didn't have to be spent. Ridiculous, and " said Jim Amblo,82, co-owner of Tarry-Ho Miniature Horses farm on the west side of Route 7 in Charlotte. Last summer VTrans workers chopped down five towering sugar maples on Amblo's property, or he explained glumly,pointing to a log pile. That was all that remained of the granddaddy trees he first tapped for syrup when his family acquired the property circa 1948. The life-size model horse that once stood sentry on his lawn overlooking the highway is now leaning against a garage, a casualty of a recent powerful windstorm. Amblo feels off-kilter, and too. He dislikes the way workers graded the bank in front…
Source: sevendaysvt.com