Alliance marks decade’s work on East Coast Greenway plan

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A group seeking to create a trail along the Eastern Seaboard marked a decade of work, acknowledging progress is slow yet vowing to stick with its vision.

The East Coast Greenway Alliance seeks a 2,551-mile greenway and continuous path for biking and walking from Florida’s Key West to the tip of Maine.

“You know the way you eat an elephant?” Eric Weiss, the alliance’s assistant director, asked at the group’s annual conference Saturday, as reported in The Providence Sunday Journal. “The answer is: one bite at a time.”

About 10 percent of the proposed trail has been officially designated by the alliance as ready for walkers, skaters and bicyclists, said Karen Votava, the alliance’s executive director. Another 7 percent of paths is awaiting designation, she added.

The nonprofit organization approved official designations for 15 newly completed or interim paths – one each in New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Maine, two in Connecticut, four in Massachusetts and six in Manhattan, one of them a pedestrian and biking path running alongside the site of the World Trade Center.

In Maine this summer, Calais dedicated a 2.6-mile stretch of pathway from downtown to the Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge.

The alliance also announced a deal with national rail operator Amtrak whereby riders may bring their bikes on trains without having to disassemble them. The one-way cost would be $5.

The service already is available on Amtrak’s Boston-to-Newport-News Twilight Shoreline Route, Votava said.

The coastal route takes advantage of trails already created or planned by states and local governments. Some of them are “urban trails,” winding through many of the East’s major cities.

For its part, Rhode Island has several paths that have already been approved or which are nearing approval. The East Coast Greenway is one of 16 National Millennium Trails in the United States. It will link nearly every urban center along the Eastern Seaboard from Maine’s border with Canada to the southern tip of Florida.