Indeed, elements typical of rural environments can – and must – be part of any truly livable urban design, as Olmstead and Vaux‘s plan for Central Park in Manhattan demonstrates, and as further proven by the Olmstead firm‘s five-mile long “Emerald Necklace” around Boston, encompassing 1000 acres of parkland, connecting the Boston Common with the 527-acre Franklin Park.

We know that the better connected parks are, the more a park system can provide healthful recreation—and transportation, too. A recent publication from The Trust for Public Land shows how interconnected trails, greenways‚ and parks support bicycling, running, walking, skating, skiing‚ and even wheelchair travel—reaching all the way from home to work for some users. And several small parks can be connected to create a “large-park experience,” with a tennis court in one park, a basketball court in another, a swimming pool in a third. Connections can be a system of sidewalks or bike lanes, complemented by outstanding signage and perhaps dressed up with a catchy name, such as the Wellness Walk or the Fitness Funway.

The easiest way to create interconnections that also extend a park system is in stream valley parks, particularly where a small stream flows into a larger river and both are flanked with trails. This kind of intersection, comparable to a highway interchange or a train junction, more than doubles the usefulness of a given route. An even more effective connection can be made by bridging a river with a pedestrian crossing, either a new bridge or a repurposed old one. Wherever this has been done—including in Austin, Cincinnati, Chattanooga, Little Rock, Minneapolis, Nashville, Omaha, Pittsburgh, and Tampa—the bridges have become instantly popular attractions.

Another great connector is a rail-trail, a park path constructed out of an abandoned train track. Most of the more than 15,000 miles of U.S. rail-trails are rural, but an increasing number are in cities, including Atlanta; Chicago; Dallas; Houston; Portland, Oregon; Orlando; Seattle; and Washington, D.C.

Platte River Greenway, Denver. Credit: Darcy Kiefel.

Even without a stream or an abandoned railroad, it’s sometimes possible to create a linear corridor. It happened in San Francisco after the public utilities commission decided to retire an underground water main through Visitacion Valley, a lower-income immigrant neighborhood. The corridor had been kept free of weighty construction over the pipe, resulting in a six-block swath of weedy lots through the heart of the community. When the commission tried to sell the land, neighbors objected and worked with The Trust for Public Land to turn it into a park and garden. Today the Visitacion Valley Greenway supports both physical exercise and improved nutrition—and introduces visitors to the exotic Asian medicinal plants growing there.

Another example of a successful city creating connectors is Denver.  In 2009, the American Obesity Association rated Denver residents the least obese of big city Americans. The reason, in part, is their sporty lifestyle. Supporting that way of life is the Platte River Greenway.

It took 30 years to create the Greenway from a former industrial backwater. Today its 15 parks linked by 100 miles of trails attract hundreds of thousands of users. The middle 12 miles—which stretch on either end deep into the suburbs—are operated by the Denver Department of Parks and Recreation, with support from the private Greenway Foundation. Its centerpiece is 22-acre Commons Park, constructed as part of a new walkable neighborhood on a former railyard on the edge of downtown.

Not only does the Greenway lure a continual stream of cyclists, runners, and walkers, the South Platte River itself was reengineered with rocks, riffles, and inflatable dams so that it offers whitewater rapids for kayakers and rafters.

Public investment in the Greenway totaling about $70 million has fueled $2.5 billion in residential, commercial, retail, sports, and entertainment projects along the corridor. Denver, which for several decades was losing population, is now growing again—and recreational opportunities are one reason why.

Randall’s article appeared in the August/September 2011 issue of Planning magazine, available here.

In 1963 famed Morton Arboretum naturalist May Theilgaard Watts wrote a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune. “We are human beings,” she wrote. “We walk upright on two feet. We need a footpath. Right now there is a chance for Chicago and its suburbs to have a footpath, a long one.” Her visionary and poetic letter led to the creation of the Illinois Prairie Path and marked the beginning of the rails-to-trails movement.

Until the interstate highway program in the 1950s, the world’s best-engineered rights-of-way were railroad corridors. Hills and cliffs were excavated, valleys filled, curves softened, tunnels dug, bridges built, all to provide routes of exquisitely smooth gentleness with little or no cross-traffic. They were also extraordinarily well routed from, to, and through the centers of activity–cities. Today, 130,000 miles of these marvelous linear connections have been abandoned. Already, 1,500 segments totaling 15,000 miles have been turned into trails for biking, skiing, skating, running, and walking. Most are rural but the urban ones almost invariably become the spines of city biking networks that also include on-road bike lanes and other feeder-collector routes. Rail trails have become focal points for nonmotorized transportation and recreation in Seattle; Washington, D.C.; Boston; Indianapolis; Dallas; Cincinnati; Spokane; Milwaukee; St. Petersburg; Albany, New York; Arlington, Virginia; Barrington, Rhode Island; and scores of other cities and towns. And there are still abandoned corridors available for conversion into trails.

The Stone Arch Bridge portion of the St. Anthony Falls Heritage Trail going towards Minneapolis. Credit: Brian Monberg, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

Minneapolis shows the multiple types of rail trails and their power to affect a city’s park, recreation, and transportation systems. Most dramatic is the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi, built by railroad baron James J. Hill for his Great Northern route to Seattle. Opened in 1883, it was in rail service until 1978. Rescued from demolition, the bridge was refurbished for non-motorized use through a variety of federal, state, and local funds and ultimately turned over to the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. Today it is the keystone of the bicycle/pedestrian network in both Minneapolis and St. Paul.

A few blocks away is the Midtown Greenway, created from a former Milwaukee Road track that maintained separation from traffic by being sunk in a box-shaped trench below street level. The 5.5-mile trail today serves several thousand bicyclists, runners, and skaters per day; in the future it will also host an extension of the light-rail system on a parallel track in the same trench. The corridor was bought for $10 million by the Hennepin County Regional Railroad Authority. Trail engineering and construction, which cost $25 million, was paid from a variety of local, regional, state, and federal sources. Annual maintenance, which includes lighting and snow plowing, comes to about $500,000 a year.

A couple of miles north, a different set of tracks has been converted into the Cedar Lake Park and Trail. This isn’t a rail-to-trail, it’s a rail-with-trail. When the Burlington Northern Railroad decided to divest itself of an underutilized freight yard, it kept one track for through service and sold the rest to the Park Board. The Board erected a fence and converted the wide industrial facility into a model nature habitat with three meandering, parallel treadways–two one-way paths for cyclists and skaters, and one soft-surface path for walkers and runners. With an extraordinary amount of community support, volunteerism, and sweat-equity, the 48-acre project cost only $3.5 million to acquire and develop, and it was finished in a record six years.

Six years is a record? Well, yes. Creating a rail trail, candidly, is not easy. The land ownership issues are confusing. Legal and regulatory complexities stretch from the local level to the state capital to Washington, D.C. A review of years-to-complete-a-trail validates the difficulty: for the Capital Crescent Trail in Washington, D.C., eleven years from conception to ribbon-cutting; for the Pinellas Trail in St. Petersburg, fifteen years; for the Minuteman Trail in Arlington, Massachusetts, eighteen years; for the Metropolitan Branch Trail in Washington, D.C., twenty-two years and (as of this writing) counting.

But the final results justify the heartache: These are truly “million-dollar trails.” Other than on a former railroad track, it is simply not possible in an existing built-up community to create a new pathway that is long, straight, wide, continuous, sheathed in vegetation, and almost entirely separated from traffic. And the annual usership numbers reveal the pent-up desire lines: 2 million on the Minuteman Trail outside of Boston; 3 million on the Washington and Old Dominion Trail outside of Washington, D.C.; 1.7 million on the Baltimore and Annapolis Trail; 1.1 million on the East Bay Bicycle Path outside of Providence, Rhode Island; and 1 million on the Capital Crescent Trail in Washington, D.C.

Many park directors initially shy away from taking on the challenge of a rail-trail. This is a serious mistake. In addition to all the connectivity and usership values, rail trails often have ecological and historical values very much in keeping with an urban park system’s mission. With corridor widths of 60 to 100 feet, or even more in the West, they frequently harbor interesting, unusual, and rare plant species on their margins, as well as having bridges, tunnels, and stations. Moreover, trails are so popular that they have radically increased the support base for virtually every park agency that has ever taken one on.

The reality is that creating one of these trails is so tough that it virtually requires a partnership between a park department (or sometimes a public works or transportation department) and the private sector (usually a citizen group, sometimes a foundation or corporation). The financial and legal issues are too much for a group of volunteers to handle alone, while the political issues are too intense for a government agency without citizen support. Some of these conversions are so difficult that a national organization, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, formed specifically to provide technical, legal, financial, and political assistance to communities around the country. The Trust for Public Land is another national organization that has been unusually active with creating urban rail trails.

More than that, trail advocates are fierce in their commitment to these facilities–many see them literally as “do or die” opportunities. In Seattle, when the Post-Intelligencer newspaper reported that the Burlington Northern Railroad had secretly sold off a piece of track that had been slated for a continuation of the Burke-Gilman Trail, cyclists were so outraged that they chained their bikes across the entranceway of Burlington Northern’s Seattle headquarters and began a vehement protest that stayed on the front pages for two months. (The railroad, which had sold the land to an out-of-state tycoon for a place to dock his yacht, found a way to rescind the deal and the corridor is now the trail extension.)

The Capital Crescent Trail as it enters Bethesda, Maryland, 7 miles from its starting point in Washington, D.C. Credit: Barbara Richey, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

In Washington, D.C., when the National Park Service was unable to get a quick congressional appropriation to save the Georgetown Branch from being developed by CSX Railroad into a string of million-dollar homes through a national park, land developer Kingdon Gould III loaned $12 million of his own money and held the land for a year until Congress acted. (The corridor is today the Capital Crescent Trail, centerpiece of what will eventually be a 20-mile “bicycle beltway” within the nation’s capital.)

The latest innovation is the overhead or trestle trail. Influenced by the creation in Paris, France, of the Promenade Plantée (“Planted Walkway”), activists in New York, Chicago, and St. Louis have all discovered abandoned rail trestles and launched campaigns to bring them back as trails. First to open, in 2009, was New York’s High Line, a sensational tour de force in the now-chic former meatpacking district. The walkway (which from day one was so crowded with pedestrians that bicycles were not permitted) includes sophisticated plantings, architectural landscaping reminiscent of railroad tracks, artistic benches and chaise longues, a viewing gallery with picture window overlooking 10th Avenue traffic, a large wall of glass panes dyed every hue of the Hudson River, food carts, seating areas, and more.

A bit less upscale but considerably longer and designed for cyclists as well as walkers, Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail is expected to open in segments as funds for the $45-million conversion are found. The Bloomingdale Trail should serve recreational cyclists as well as purposeful commuters since one day it could join an interconnected trailway linking all the way from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River. St. Louis’s Iron Horse Trestle will also prove helpful to cyclists, runners, and walkers of all stripes since it passes over busy Interstate 70 and leads toward the popular Riverfront Trail along the Mississippi River.

The Hollywood sign draped to read SAVE THE PEAK from Gower Avenue in Los Angeles. Credit: Rich Reid

The famous Hollywood sign has stood for decades in regal solitude on Cahuenga Peak, gazing out over Los Angeles. When the land surrounding the “H” was threatened by a luxury housing development in 2009, The Trust for Public Land stepped forward to lead the effort to purchase the 138 acres surrounding the iconic letters.

The year-long campaign, which culminated in April 2010, involved thousands of donors – including some high-profile figures like Hugh Hefner and Governor Schwarzenegger, who announced “I am proud we were able to come together and create a public-private partnership to protect this historic symbol that will continue to welcome dreamers, artists and Austrian bodybuilders for generations to come.” The land is not just a pretty backdrop for the sign that beckons aspiring stars; it is a popular hiking area and wildlife corridor.

Now the 138-acre addition to Griffith Park has been nominated for The Daily Green’s 2011 Heart of Green Award in the Best New Parks category. Go here to vote, and take a moment to check out some of the other urban parks success stories from the past year. While there, feel free to vote for your favorite Best New Trail as well.

Voting is ongoing through March 27^th, and winners will be announced on April 4^th.

Boulder Greenway. Credit: City of Boulder

That’s the finding from Boulder, Colorado (pop. 100,000), the conservation-minded home of the University of Colorado and a national leader in combating auto traffic, energy waste and sprawl.

Back in 1990 Boulder rejected the concept of widening roads and constructing interchanges in order to “build its way out of congestion.” Instead, the city’s Transportation Master Plan promoted transit, bicycles, pedestrian facilities, and a greenway park. 

Now, 20 years later, the city has released a report on its progress, which has been remarkable. Residents commute by bike at 20 times the national average, and nearly one in 10 walk to work. As for the greenway, it has grown by an average of one mile of off-street path and two underpasses a year, even while maintaining the hallmarks of both an innovative transportation solution and an excellent city park.

The genesis of the 17-mile greenway system can be traced to the words of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., who in 1910 warned of the dangers of channelizing Boulder Creek. Allowing the creek to occupy its natural floodplain was a “straightforward question of hydraulics and municipal common sense,” he said. A century later, the creek has developed into a downtown centerpiece: at once a popular route for commuters, a method for preserving cultural and environmental resources, and an area for outdoor recreation.

The greenway has a clear and comprehensive set of objectives, thereby fulfilling the first measure of an Excellent City Park System. Planners carved out niches for “passive recreation” so that in addition to rollerblading, cycling, and walking, it’s easy to find a place more suited to reading, observing wildlife, or wading in the stream. There are also adjacent areas for individual and team sports, outdoor programs, and general recreation.

The city enthusiastically promotes trail use through cycling events. Every June, Boulder celebrates Walk & Bike Month, consisting of 95 events and a Bike to Work Day attended by 5,000 cyclists this year. (Even Winter Bike to Work Day attracted 1,200 cyclists.) Two bike corrals recently replaced street parking in downtown, and a bike share program is in the works for 2011. Though spearheaded by the transportation department, these events increase the exposure and use of city parks. Similarly, the statistics tracked by the transportation department justify continued investment in park amenities along the greenway.

Perhaps more impressive than any single accomplishment is the way Boulder’s transportation planners, environmentalists, and park organizations work together for everyone. The budget is composed of equal contributions from lottery, flood control, and transit funds, and maintenance is performed by staff from the Parks, Forestry, Open Space, and Flood Utility departments. The bikeway even has a dedicated winter maintenance crew that can plow the entire network in 8 hours.   

Is Boulder with its college demographics a unique case? Evidently not. The Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis is another example of a hybrid trail-park which has successfully pursued transportation, recreation, and greening objectives in a dense and diverse area. The Midtown Greenway connects to parks via the Grand Rounds Scenic Byway (see Density Zoning / Midtown Greenway) and efforts are underway to add pocket parks and public performance spaces along the trail. Numerous other urban rail-trails, such as Seattle’s Burke-Gilman Trail and Washington, D.C.’s Capital Crescent Trail, serve similarly varied purposes and diverse populations.

Boulder’s greenway system can serve as a guide for those who seek to integrate form and function by creating attractive public spaces and minimizing car traffic simultaneously. Boulder demonstrates that a broad set of goals can spur productive cooperation, but it is apparent that clearly defined objectives and a commitment to measuring progress are a precondition for success.

Last month, more than one hundred advocates of urban pathways, greenways and trails from the private and public sectors met in New Orleans for the first in a series of meetings to discuss best practices that encourage physical activity on shared-use pathways in urban neighborhoods.

Topics of discussion included engaging police departments and volunteers to patrol trails, design techniques to improve pedestrian safety at road crossings and how to effectively engage local communities that live or work near a trail. The discussions and presentations that took place were recorded and, as available, are being uploaded to Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s Urban Pathways Initiative website. Videos of

In many cases, greenway advocates must sustain public interest and support during the long process of planning and constructing a trail. In the first video above, Miquela Craytor of Sustainable South Bronx provides examples of how her organization has worked with the community through both programming such as block parties and 5K runs, and through the design process by working to include benches on the greenway that could deter crime while simultaneously providing a community amenity.

In the second video, Bart Everson and Daniel Samuels explain how the Lafitte Greenway in New Orleans evolved after Hurricane Katrina from an idea shared by a few friends to a critical part of that city’s emerging bicycle and pedestrian network.

To participate in this national learning network of advocates and professionals working on urban pathways, join Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s Urban Pathways Initiative by signing up for e-mails and subscribing to our RSS feed.

Salem's Union Street Bridge, cc: Flickr user Hinzi

We’ve been looking into what can make healthy cities, and how park systems can better be a part of this. One feature that’s come up in several cities is the pedestrian/bike bridge.

Cities across the country are adding these bridges as part of their trail and park networks – including the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis, the Kerrey Bridge in Omaha, the Walnut Street Bridge in Chattanooga, the Junction Bridge in Little Rock and others. Free of car traffic, noise and the unsafe conditions sometimes found on auto bridges, for those cities with rivers and large streams at least one bike and pedestrian exclusive bridge is a must for encouraging frequent exercise and the enjoyment of residents.

A recent success story can be found in Salem, Oregon, where the city retrofitted the Union Street Bridge for pedestrian and bike-only use. The steel frame, former railroad bridge gracing the Willamette River now connects 114-acre Wallace Marine Park on one side with 23-acre Riverfront Park and the city’s downtown on the other.

Since its opening earlier this year, the span has been used for running events, increased trail usage coming from across the river, visitors to downtown who use the river’s parks, and it has spurred the whole renewal of the trail system to extend into other parts of the city from this central location.  We caught up with the city’s parks and transportation services manager, Mark Becktel, who noted that “the bridge has become hugely popular with the community, used night and day by pedestrians and bicyclists.”

Funding for the conversion came from a $600,000 federal transportation enhancements grant, state grants for local parks and trails, the city and the private Cycle Oregon Fund, with Union Pacific railroad company selling the bridge to the city for $1 along with establishing a $550,000 maintenance fund.

DeFazio Bridge in Eugune (with its congressional champion and namesake). cc: Flickr user shanerh

Bridges for people do not always have to come from an existing structure. Just down the Willamette River, Eugene, Oregon built a new bridge from scratch to provide a key link across the Willamette River into its central core. Completed in 1999 and named for the Congressman who secured a portion of its funding, the Peter DeFazio Bridge has is an important and popular link within the city’s 33-mile trail network. Completed at a cost of 2.4 million dollars, the nearly 600-foot bridge has helped Eugene become one of the most bicycled cities in the country.

In the coming weeks, we’ll try to give a round up of several bridge projects.

The 18-acre strip, now held by a mortgage company, is part of a mostly city-owned three-mile tract that follows along an unused railway bed beginning near Basin Street Station, continuing along Lafitte Street across North Carrollton Avenue and ending near Canal Boulevard.

The area includes the Sojourner Truth Community Center, a gas station at Lafitte and Broad streets where public employees fill their cars, and the old brake tag station at Lafitte and Jefferson Davis Parkway.

“All these facilities will be repurposed to serve the greenway corridor, ” said Dubravka Gilic, director of strategic planning for the city recovery office.

Daniel Samuels, an architect, is a founding member of Friends of Lafitte Corridor, a three-year-old community group that has been the most visible advocate for creation of the corridor. He said the idea of turning this area into public space is not new.

“City planning documents have recognized the potential of that corridor going all the way back to the 1976 Claiborne Avenue Design Team Study done by Cliff James and Rudy Lombard, to successive phases of the New Orleans New Century Master Plan, which was started in the 1990s, ” Samuels said.

Curitiba, Brazil

One of the most well regarded world cities in terms of urban planning is Curitiba, Brazil — a place known for its efficient and innovative bus rapid transit system. But the city is also known for its parks, in particular using them to increase quality of life and act as green infrastructure to protect against floods.

The city has about 50 square meters of parkland per person (i.e. 12 acres per 1000), most of which were created in the last 30 years under the direction of forward-looking urban planner/former mayor Jaime Lerner. The protected land is complemented by compact housing, as the city of 1.5 million has a population density of 10,750 per square mile (which is around the same as Philadelphia or Washington, D.C.).

Roughly 21 million square meters (5,190 acres) are linear parks along rivers and streams that act as buffers between flood-prone rivers and the city. Legislation set aside certain low-lying areas and river basins as special protection and management areas. The city also used a loan to purchase land at a number of critical sites around the city. Engineers built small damns and created new lakes that act as holding basins when flooding occurs.

In effect, these green spaces are giant stormwater facilities, with the lakes as central features. If rains are heavy, the lake rises over the surrounding parks. And Lerner and parks director Hitochi Nakamura made sure to connect places to one another (as mentioned in the below linked video). Together they helped create over 90 miles of new trails within the city, located in southern Brazil about 250 miles southwest of São Paulo.

Much has been done to document what’s occurred in Curitiba. A nice 15-minute video (YouTube) by Journeyman Productions gives a good overview, and includes interviews with both Lerner and Nakamura. (The segment on parks starts just after the seven-minute mark.) Another good resource on all of the planning efforts and problems that persist in the city is the book, Urban Renewal, Municipal Revitalization: the Case of Curitiba Brazil.

Midtown Bike Center, Midtown Greenway, Minneapolis; cc: Flickr user livewombat

We visited the Midtown Bike Center in Minneapolis last month, and biked away incredibly impressed. Located along the city’s Midtown Greenway, the location seems more a lifestyle center than bike facility. Initiated through a partnership between Allina Health Systems (a hospital network), the City of Minneapolis and Freewheel, the station includes:

• Long and short term bike storage — costs range from $5 for one day to $110 per year;
• Bike rentals, that are utilized by hotel guests staying at the Sheraton across the Greenway;
• A full bike shop that also offers repair classes and a public maintenance facility available to anyone; and
• The “Bike Cafe” coffee shop/deli, which might be the nicest feature of the whole setup. (The center has a slideshow of pictures of the features.)

The facility cost $800,000 and came from a combination of federal funding, city money, private contributions and the bike shop.

McDonald's Cycle Center in Millennium Park, Chicago; cc:Treehugger

The spot is modeled after another popular bike station we also visited last week in Chicago’s Millennium Park. The McDonald’s Cycle Center offers 300 secure spaces along with lockers, showers and a repair shop. It also offers rentals, which were totally sold out when we visited on a sunny September Sunday. Completed in 2004, the structure cost $3.2 million, with some federal congestion mitigation assistance.

The stations can also be complementary elements to transit facilities. In Minneapolis, planners hope to have a trolley line adjacent to the bike trail. The center is already a short distance from an existing light rail station and buses. The Chicago station is a stone’s throw from the city’s commuter Metra line, and in Washington, D.C. the building is located at the meeting point of Amtrak, commuter rail, subway and bus.