Organized greenway rides such as Saturday’s 28-miler in Durham celebrating the East Coast Greenway Alliance’s relocation to Durham showcase these valuable community assets — and underscore how we need more of them.
If that sounds familiar, I wrote essentially the same thing after last year’s Cross Triangle Greenway ride recognizing the region’s growing greenway network.
No matter where you plan to be in North Carolina this weekend, you can hook up with a good bike ride.
Piedmont
Often when you move into new digs there’s so much going on you don’t have time to throw an open house. A couple months may pass before it dawns on you, “Oh, yeah … .”
When the East Coast Greenway Alliance announced in February it was moving its headquarters from Rhode Island to the Triangle, the move was a good sign for the state — and a sign that we need help.
The Alliance is the driving force behind the East Coast Greenway, an in-the-works greenway that will one day run continuously from Key West, Fla., to Canada, a distance of nearly 3,000 miles. It bills itself as the urban alternative to the Appalachian Trail, offering a pedestrian-width ribbon of pavement instead natural surface and traveling through as many municipalities as possible, rather than avoiding them. More than 25 percent of the trail now exists. Problem is, the vast majority of the completed path lies well to the north.
Friday’s Cross Triangle Greenway bike ride showed just how far the Triangle’s greenway system has come — and how far it has to go.
The ride was the first of what promises to be an annual event. The ride — a 39-mile excursion from the N.C. Museum of Art in Raleigh to the entertainment Mecca of downtown Durham (American Tobacco Complex, Durham Bulls Athletic Park, Durham Performing Arts Center, the jail) was intended to show how a dream of 40 years — of being able to ride a bike on greenway from Raleigh to the heart of Durham — is ever-so-close to being reality. About 75 percent of Friday’s ride was off-road: starting on the Reedy Creek Greenway in Raleigh, winding through Umstead State Park (save for an odd “short-cut” that had us mixing it up with lunchtime traffic on Harrison Avenue and Weston Parkway) down Cary’s Black Creek and White Oak Creek greenways and on to the American Tobacco Trail for the 22-mile (plus or minus) ride into downtown Durham.