The residents and businesspeople of Saugus, close to the Massachusetts coastline, are celebrating today with the long-awaited beginning of work on their section of the Northern Strand Community Trail.
The times are a'changing in Texas. In centers like Denton, San Antonio, Austin, Houston and Fort Worth, planners are recognizing the importance of bike (and pedestrian) infrastructure, and as a result, ridership and bike-inspired initiatives are on the up.
One of the great stories in Community Built features Friends of the Northern Rail Trail in rural New Hampshire. Now the longest rail-trail in the state, the corridor follows the right-of-way of the former Northern Railroad, which discontinued service in 1970. It is currently 49 miles long and will eventually cover 57.5 miles when completed.
Yesterday RTC hosted the first of two webinars exploring the nuts and bolts of this legislation, MAP-21, and offering advice for local practitioners on how to encourage their state to make good use of the limited pot of funds available for trails, biking and walking.
The Federal Transportation Bill finally presented to Congress today takes a step back from key reforms of recent decades, says Rails-to-Trails Conservancy's (RTC) Vice President of Policy and Trail Development Kevin Mills.
Every year, the National Park Service helps hundreds of locally driven projects that create opportunities for healthy outdoor recreation, connect youth with the outdoors, and connect communities to parks.
For more than 20 years, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (RTC) has been one of the strongest members of Pennsylvania's trail development, advocacy and promotion community. Thanks in part to our efforts, Pennsylvania is now a state with plenty of rail-trail activity, a strong supporter base and a wonderful network of outdoor recreation assets.
The U.S. Congress last week was handed the statistical analysis of the first three years of the groundbreaking Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program (NTPP), which dedicated $25 million to each of four communities across the country to accurately demonstrate whether such investments equate to significantly higher levels of walking and bicycling, and a reduction in vehicle miles traveled.
"There is a perception that (trails) are nice amenities from a recreational standpoint, but with $4-a-gallon gas I have seen a lot of people out there biking and making an economic choice," Shailen Bhatt, secretary of the Delaware Department of Transportation, told Delaware Online this week.
Word just came in from the Department of Transportation that the U.S. Congress will later today receive the much-anticipated report detailing the measureable impacts of the Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program (NTPP).
Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (RTC) is this week mobilizing its thousands of members and supporters in Pennsylvania in defense of the Keystone Recreation, Park and Conservation Fund--a immensely popular and successful program that has supported trails and open space creation in that state for the past 19 years.
