Beyond Greenways: The Next Step for City Trails and Walking Routes

By Robert Searns

If your doorstep were a trailhead, how would you experience your city? With this newfound freedom, you might head in a new direction—walk to a restaurant in an area you’ve never explored, begin to savor your daily walk to work, or set out with a daypack to the city edges for fresh air and nature. Despite the known health benefits of routine walking, many people don’t have pleasant, safe places to walk. Too often, street networks have barriers—cul-de-sacs, freeways, or busy, dangerous-to-cross, arterials. Many lack sidewalks at all. There is a clear need for high-quality, readily accessible pedestrian infrastructure in and around urban areas.

In Beyond Greenways: The Next Step for City Trails and Walking Routes, greenways expert Robert Searns makes a case for walking infrastructure that serves a more diverse array of people. He builds on the legacy of boulevards, parkways, and greenways to introduce a next generation of more accessible pathways, wide enough for two people to stroll together, that stitch together urban and suburban areas. With more trails built near neighborhoods that haven’t had access to them, more people can get around on foot, in town or further out. Searns lays out practical advice on how to plan and design them, garner community support, and get them built. Drawing inspiration from the US and abroad, he introduces two models—grand loop trails and town walks. Grand loop trails are regional-scale, 20 to 350-mile systems that encircle metro areas, running along the edges where city meets countryside. Town walks are shorter—2 to 6-mile routes in cities. Throughout, Searns presents examples that embody these ideals, from Tucson’s Turquoise Trail, created by just two people with an idea and some left-over blue paint the city had, to a more deluxe 5-mile loop in Denver, to the Maricopa trail in Phoenix, a completed 315 mile grand loop. He also envisions these trails in new places across North America.

Planners, trail advocates, community leaders and those who just want closer-in places to hike or walk will find the tools they need to develop successful and affordable plans, including how to envision them to fit various settings and strategies for implementation. Now is the time to think beyond greenways, to pursue a legacy of accessible pedestrian routes for this, and future, generations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Jul 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642832648

Book preview

Introduction

We frequently walk with the sole purpose of getting from one place to another. But where are we in between? With every step we can feel the miracle of walking on solid ground. We can arrive in the present moment with every step.

—Thich Nhat Hanh¹

If I were to use a single word to express the current times, the stress, the pressure, the constant barrage of breaking news, pending doom and gloom from pandemics to climate change, I would say confined. Maybe trapped is a better word. Sedentary behavior and screen time increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the US National Institute of Health, 51 percent of adults and 67 percent of children reported increases in total screen time, and 52 percent of adults and 60 percent of children reported increases in leisure screen time.² Although for many the illusion of a get-away is there, we need more.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 42 percent of the people in the United States are obese and are increasingly suffering from the associated health impacts, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease. And although this problem is widespread across all peoples, minority communities and lower-income populations are particularly prone with rates at least 14 percent higher.³ Given that very troubling health concern, it’s not surprising that the CDC specifically cites the need for safe, convenient, places to walk . . . places to move about . . . protected from traffic and safe from crime and hazards. Routine walking has myriad health benefits, including preventing and managing health conditions such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes, increasing energy levels, and strengthening the immune system.⁴ Sometimes you must go out the door, just walk, nothing programmed or highly structured, be in nature, and walk pleasurably without trepidation or