David Brickley, a 62-year-old lawyer and former state legislator in Prince William County, is spearheading local efforts to tie Prince William and Virginia into the 3,000-mile East Coast Greenway that runs from the Canadian border to Key West, Fla. The
Manassas Journal Messenger has the story
here.
The trail is a grassroots initiative working under the auspices of the non-profit East Coast Greenway Alliance to stitch together local owned and managed walking/biking trails. The Alliance
website describes the greenway as:
The nation’s first long-distance urban trail system; a city-to-city transportation corridor for cyclists, hikers, and other non-motorized users. By connecting existing and planned trails, a continuous, safe, green route 3,000 miles long is being formed… It incorporates waterfront esplanades, park paths, abandoned railroad corridors, canal towpaths, and highway corridors, and in many areas it it temporarily follows streets and roads to link these completed trail sections together.
Already, 21 % of this route is along off-road trail and the aim is for it to be entirely off-road and traffic-free.
I had never heard of this initiative before, but it sounds absolutely wonderful. What really impresses me is that the greenway is a private, grassroots effort. The federal government isn’t imposing this greenway on anyone. It isn’t taking anyone’s land. It isn’t hitting up taxpayers from other parts of the country to pay for the project. The greenway arises from the efforts and contributions of local governments and citizen groups. It may take longer to achieve the vision this way, but the citizenry will own the final results.
(Photo credit: East Coast Greenway. Shows Roosevelt Island, in the Potomac River between Washington, D.C., and Virginia. I’m not sure I’d want to cycle along this particular stretch of road — but it’s the only Virginia shot I could find.)
