Inspiration

The East Coast Greenway Is Becoming One of America’s Most Visited Outdoor Spaces

The decades-long project to create a paved trail that runs along the entire Eastern Seaboard has gained renewed interest during the pandemic.
A1A highway in Florida. Aerial View
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Most weekend mornings, I spend hours on my big, black commuter bike, riding alongside my three-year-old son as he slowly masters his own two-wheeler. Often, we ride a six-mile out-and-back on the American Tobacco Trail as it cuts a swath in the woods near our home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Grand oak trees and tall, skinny pines curve over the paved trail, providing respite from the infamous and brutal midsummer Southern sun. We pass dozens of bikers, speedwalkers, dogwalkers, walker-walkers, talkers, listeners, parents nervously watching their children learning to pedal, jogging couples old and young, athletes, students, townies, rollerbladers, longboarders, skateboarders, scooter kids—and, usually, at least one unicyclist.

The American Tobacco Trail is just one vein of the much larger East Coast Greenway, buttressed on either side by hundreds of miles of interconnected trail, road, paved path, and gravel that allows non-motorized transport from the Canadian border at Calais, Maine, to Key West’s famous monument denoting the southernmost point of the United States. “From the moose to the manatee,” is the mantra repeated to me by East Coast Greenway Alliance’s executive director Dennis Markatos-Soriano, as we rode a small stretch of the Greenway together one recent afternoon.

The Tobacco Trail in North Carolina, part of the greater East Coast Greenway

Courtesy East Coast Greenway Alliance

Founded in 1991, when city planners from Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., came together wondering why their independent greenways weren’t connected, the East Coast Greenway has been envisioned and designed as a contiguous path coursing down the entire coast to encourage non-motorized travel for work or recreation. But it's taken years to inch toward a completely paved and protected path—currently, a little over one-thousand miles of the East Coast Greenway is protected pathway, up from 850 in 2016.

Visitor numbers are rapidly increasing, though. Markatos-Soriano has been the executive director of the Alliance since 2009, during which time the East Coast Greenway has grown to become America’s most visited park, welcoming more than 50 million bikes rides, runs, and walks last year alone. In fact, in 2020, the Greenway welcomed an average of nearly 137,000 trips per day—a boom of over 50 percent more riders than the year prior, due in large part to the pandemic.

“In the madness and difficulty of the last 18 months, the Greenway provided a sanctuary of sanity and haven of health as people flocked to our linear park,” Markatos-Soriano says. The East Coast Greenway Alliance doesn’t see the bounty of pandemic-era trips as a fleeting phase, though. Rather, it is their aim to convert those people into regular and lifetime users of the Greenway.

“We want to get to 140 million trips [annually],” Markatos-Soriano says, noting how hitting that number would make the East Coast Greenway the most traveled infrastructure project in America, besting Los Angeles’s 405 freeway. For Markatos-Soriano, a goal of that magnitude is a symbol of transformation “toward a climate future that is much better than the trajectory we’re on right now.”

As the organization works towards someday creating a fully protected, coast-spanning Greenway—where riders, walkers, joggers, and the like don’t have to worry about riding on public roads, competing with the potential hazards of motorized traffic—the Alliance has set lofty financial and timeline benchmarks.

“If we can get 10 billion dollars in Greenway investment, we think we can complete the East Coast Greenway this decade, which would be lightning fast for an infrastructure project,” Markatos-Soriano says, citing a more daunting 30-year timeline to completion if Greenway funding continues at historical rates.

With well-marked roads and trails connecting everything, some riders are already riding the length of the seaboard—76 have completed that larger trip so far. Those up for the task can cruise from Calais down to Boston, choosing to either head west into Massachusetts or hop a ferry down to Cape Cod; roll down the West Side of Manhattan, from the Cloisters to Battery Park; head through the living history of Washington, D.C., and Richmond; find shade beneath Savannah’s draping Spanish Moss; and cruise those final flat miles down the famed A1A as it runs along Florida’s crystalline coast. Throughout the journey, there are also paved alternatives for rougher stretches, Markatos-Soriano says, with smooth roads adjacent to “more natural” paths.

But even when the entire length of the greenway is connected, that likely won’t be the primary way it’s used. What’s more realistic than a seaboard-spanning 3,000-mile trip is a small jaunt on some shorter, local portion of the trail, for recreation, exercise, or as a daily commute by bike, foot, or, maybe, unicycle.