The Neuse River Trail: Backbone of Raleigh's greenway system.
Within two years, here’s how your day on the Raleigh greenways might look.
You start out on a bike ride at Lake Johnson. Park at the boathouse and take a leisurely (except for the hills on the lake’s south side) lap around the lake before heading down Walnut Creek through N.C. State’s Centennial Campus taking note of all the new construction. Stop at the Farmer’s Market to see if the strawberries are in yet, then continue downstream on some of Raleigh’s oldest greenway. Pass the abandoned E.B. Bain water treatment plant, swing by the Walnut Creek Wetland Center, pass through Worthdale and Walnut Creek parks and head on down to the Neuse River.read more
Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.read more
Raleigh’s highly anticipated 3-mile House Creek Greenway is scheduled to open in March. Sunday, I took a little inspection tour. More about that in a sec. First, about that “highly anticipated” description.
In Raleigh’s rapidly expanding greenway network, 3 miles isn’t a lot. The system consists of close to 70 miles at this point, and this 3-mile stretch is dwarfed, sizewise, by another stretch also under construction: the 28-mile Neuse River Trail, which opened its first 6.5-mile stretch in October and expects to be completely done — from the Falls dam south to the Johnston County line — in 2013.read more
While Durham officials circle their wagons and privately mull how to come up with another $2 million to build a pivotal pedestrian bridge over I-40, thereby completing the 22-mile American Tobacco Trail, others outside the city are more candid with possible solutions.read more
I pulled over on the greenway and stared at the sign, puzzled. Puzzled not by the sign’s message, which was clear. Puzzled by its mere existence.
For years, the Triangle’s greenways consisted of strings of half-mile and mile-long bits of elbow macaroni, scattered about. Signs — signs showing you where you were and where you could go — weren’t a priority on a path that simply went from Point A to Point B. But as those greenways grew and those bits of elbow macaroni joined to form longer and interconnected noodles, the need for direction, for signs, increased. For the past decade or so, the main complaint about local greenways has been the absence of signs.read more
