It was almost a perfect year: not a single vehicle got stuck on the three-and-a-half-mile-long Smugglers Notch segment of Route 108, a winding road infamous for the unlucky tractor-trailer truck drivers who find themselves trapped on it, requiring hours-long shutdowns to pull them out.
That record was shattered last Thursday when a bus forced state police to shut the road down for several hours. But having only one "Stuckage" by the end of September is still the lowest number on record, a huge success in the yearslong saga to keep big vehicles off the road.
The state's efforts, including thousands of dollars in fines and signs in English and French as well as pictographs, reduced the number of stuckages, but didn't stop the problem entirely, said Todd Sears, deputy director of the Project Development Bureau at the state Agency of Transportation. Truckers using freight navigation packages log the unsafe nature of the Notch for other truckers, but that only applies to truckers using those programs.
“What we found is that most of the motorists, including the freight haulers, that got stuck up there in past years, they didn’t use the freight packages. They just used what and you and I would use: Apple Maps, Google Maps, something like that,” Sears said, noting that the vast majority of people who use those apps are not driving vehicles that would get stuck on 108.
After years of deliberation, the breakthrough came this year with the installation of temporary (for now) barriers called chicanes, a series of orange barrels and plastic curbs that mimic the curviness of the road. It was a solution chosen in part, Sears said, because the state could easily experiment with it to test its effectiveness.
“Basically, what they do is emulate the terrain that you find way up at the Notch, but you bring it down lower, so that trucks, when they’re coming up, if they can’t navigate there, then they have the opportunity to just back up and head back down the mountain,” Sears said.
Removing stuck trucks is time- and labor-intensive, said Vermont State Police Lt. Paul Ravelin. Police must block off the road and a heavy-duty tow truck needs to pull the stuck vehicle, giving it enough room to then back itself up enough to turn around and finally exit the Notch.
“The less time that we have to head up to the mountain for a stuck commercial motor vehicle, the more time we have for other responses,” Ravelin said.
Everyone benefits from a stuckage-free Notch, but there is one party facing a very, very minor consequence: the Stowe Rotary Club. Two years ago, the club started a Stuck Truck Raffle: for $10 a ticket, participants can bet on the date of the first stuckage of the year. The winner receives half of the proceeds, the other half goes to the club's scholarship fund.
Last year, the raffle raised $6,000. This year, it raised $430, said Richard Litchfield, the club president, attributing decreased interest in part to news of the chicanes. With the problem of stuckages seemingly solved, he said the organization probably won’t do the raffle again next year.
But even though it wasn’t a truck that got stuck, a bus was close enough to declare a winner: one lucky donor received a handsome $215.
“We felt — in the spirit of the contest — to be fair to the winner, to be fair to the participants,” Litchfield said. “It was a truck-like vehicle. So we felt it was the right thing to do.”
Have questions, comments or tips? Send us a message. Or contact the reporter directly at corey.dockser@vermontpublic.org.
