Shortly after 4 p.m. Wednesday, just as rush hour traffic began to jam Constitution Avenue, Edward Miller and Harold Thomas knocked off for the day. The two-man crew with D.C.’s transportation department had been installing new signs along the National Mall since 9 a.m.
Now there were about 150 elegantly simple signs showing the route of the East Coast Greenway from Union Station to 17th Street by the Washington Monument; Miller and Thomas would be back in the morning to strap more green, white and blue vertical signs to traffic posts, so bike riders and hikers could see a clear path along the Mall to Memorial Bridge.
Erecting Greenway signs along the Mall is a milestone for the trail, and one that took years to reach. The Greenway is a 3,000-mile route from Key West, Fla., to Calais, Maine. It parallels the Appalachian Trail but connects cities rather than mountain ridges. Now most of the Greenway is a line on a map rather than an actual trail — so defining and signing a usable trail along the Mall is, well, monumental.
“It’s important to the Greenway because Washington, D.C., represents the centerpiece of the entire network,” says Jack Keene, the organization’s trail coordinator. “It also sets an important precedent — if we can erect Greenway signs on the Mall, other cities will be more amenable.”
This is good news for trail builders, a hearty breed of persistent souls who devote themselves to linking path to path so that we can safely ride or walk or roller blade along, in this case from Maine to Florida. But the completion of every strip of trail also magnifies its gaps. In the case of the Greenway around and through the nation’s capital, there are more gaps than trails.
Let’s take the Metropolitan Branch Trail. Designed to connect Silver Spring to Union Station along the Metro route, the trail was funded in 1998 with $8.5 million. A decade later, only three short segments of the eight-mile trail have been completed.
To connect with the East Coast Greenway system in Maryland, which takes riders north, the Met Branch has to go from Fort Totten to the Prince George’s County line through federal parkland. That short spur has been in the planning stages for 20 years.
Heading south, the Greenway’s Mall trail connects with the Mount Vernon Trail, but then it quits. An active Virginia trail group, headed by Dave Brickley, is working with the Fairfax County Park Authority to link the Mount Vernon Trail to the Occoquan River and south to the Williamsburg and Richmond.
And on to Florida.
What I so admire about committed trail builders — like the Greenway’s D.C. chairman, Bob Patten — is how they can keep the dream of a 3,000-mile trail alive, as they build and mark the trails through cities, often block by block.
As Miller and Thomas drove away in their DDOT truck, Patten followed the fresh signs back to Union Station — astride his bike.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected].
