Sunday, September 14, 2008
News

PATH: The Silver Comet turns 10

Speeches will be made, vittles consumed and a ribbon cut...

By Mark Woolsey
 
The PATH Foundation’s Midtown offices inside WSB-TV have a Spartan look. The walls are decorated only with charts, graphs and maps outlining projects in various stages of development.

Fully 90 percent of the money the organization collects goes “on the ground,” says PATH executive director Ed McBrayer.
   
The stripped-down approach has paid off.

PATH will celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Silver Comet Trail’s construction on Sept. 27 with a ceremony where the Comet, mainly a rails-to-trails thoroughfare, links to a similar trail on the state line leading to Anniston, Ala. Speeches will be made, vittles consumed and a ribbon cut. Similarly, an Oct. 18 dedication in the West End will cap the construction of the Beltline’s first multi-use trail segment. It stretches from Gordon-White Park, presently undergoing a $1 million renovation, to near Brown Middle School on Lawton Street.
   
These are milestones in PATH ’s aggressive push for federal, state and local funding for alternative transportation, the results of partnerships forged with local governments. But there have been a few potholes along the way.
  
“When we first started in 1991 and ’92, and particularly during the building of the Stone Mountain Trail, nobody in Atlanta knew what a multi-use trail was,” says the lanky McBrayer, who uses the trails himself. “That’s about the time that the Georgia Department of Transportation discovered that they had to allocate a certain amount of money from what they receive from the feds for multi-use trails and converting rails-to-trails, and we were right there at their doorstep.”
   
Asked about the organization’s origin, McBrayer points out a picture taken 20 years ago. It shows a young couple pushing a baby carriage and walking their dog near a major Atlanta street, navigating a concrete gutter because there’s no sidewalk, no multi-use trail, no alternative to traffic whizzing by a few feet away. The danger is obvious.
  
That’s why McBrayer and a like-minded group of cycling buddies formed the non-profit PATH Foundation in 1991. Their aim: building a network of dedicated, paved, 10- to 12-foot wide bike/walk/jog/rollerblade trails across Atlanta and North Georgia. Their efforts can be seen not only in the Silver Comet Trail and Stone Mountain Park Trail, but also the Arabia Mountain Trail. Today, millions of people use these paths each year.
  
 The last foot of the Silver Comet Trail was poured at the end of August, giving walkers and cyclists an unbroken, 61-mile paved route from Smyrna to the Alabama-Georgia border. And work is nearing an end on the first just-over-a-mile segment of a planned network of Beltline project trails.
  
Since PATH’s start, initial skepticism and pushback have turned to support.

McBrayer recalls a state senator from Cedartown saying that his constituents “didn’t want a bunch of Atlantans in tight pants coming through on thousand-dollar bicycles.” Nowadays, McBrayer says, restaurants and other businesses along the trails—even in Cedartown—cater to the growing crowds of hikers and cyclists.
  
Opposition also came closer to home.
      
“The city of Atlanta was slow on the uptake to help us build trails. We get a lot more cooperation now,” McBrayer says. “But in the beginning, it was like we were doing something to them instead of with them.”
   
McBrayer thinks the initial reticence reflected that “the city was set up to move as many cars as possible through, and bikes and pedestrians just kind of fell off the table.”
 
What’s changed, he says, is a growing national and local movement toward cycling and walking as alternative transportation, pressure from local biking groups and an influx of residents from other cities where pedestrians and cyclists aren’t forced to choose between being “the quick or the dead.”
   
Rebecca Serna, executive director of the Atlanta Bicycle Campaign, agrees that a sea change has occurred. She points to the Connect Atlanta plan, the city’s first comprehensive transportation project under development. She says drafts she’s seen call for an extensive, connected network of primary and secondary bike lanes and routes. That’s a departure from the piecemeal approach that has seen a sporadic lane here, a segment there, sometimes so narrow that cyclists face danger not only from traffic but also from being hit by opening car doors.
  
“We have not made bike lanes a priority,” Serna says. “The policy has been that we’ll build them, but only if we’re doing road reconstruction and that road happens to be in a bike plan somewhere.”

        McBrayer says that in order to “punch the cycling community’s ticket,” local governments have “painted a line on a road and called it a bike lane even though it’s not wide enough and it’s not kept cleaned up like it should be.”
    
A BRIDGE TO STONE MOUNTAIN

For example, there’s a point in the mostly off-road Stone Mountain Trail where drivers must use a busy bridge over I-285 at Church Street along with other traffic, says McBrayer. But a new, cyclists-and-pedestrians-only bridge over the interstate should be finished early next year.

McBrayer says local permitting and environmental-regulation hoops for such projects have gotten more daunting over the years, as governments have tightened regulations on things like erosion and sediment control. Nowadays, he says, it takes two to three years from initial concept to construction. Back at the outset, ramp-up time was more like three or four months.
  
     
To make any project work, grant applications are written for funding from sources including federal clean-air and congestion mitigation programs. Working partnerships are set up with the Georgia DOT and local governments. Government grants and sources typically foot the bill for about 70 percent of a project. Capital campaigns targeting private sources provide for the remainder.

Long-term, McBrayer says, the goal is a seamless connection of the city's bike routes with the PATH portion of the Beltline. And creative solutions may be necessary, such as converting part of Ralph McGill Boulevard to green space as part of the planned expansion of the Stone Mountain trail into downtown Atlanta.

    
     A recent flap with residents opposed to a mile-long project that PATH was hired by DeKalb County to build has brought some anti-PATH sentiment to the surface. A judge has ruled that particular path, designed to connect two county parks, illegal and stopped work. The county has appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court. McBrayer remains undeterred.
  
“A few neighbors had it for their own playground for a long time, and now they’re pulling out the stops, even with the trail mostly done,” he says. “But we’re committed to building the trail.” SP