This week, the Circuit Trails Action Team leaders Daniel Paschall of the East Coast Greenway Alliance, and Lizzie Hessek of Pennsylvania Environmental Council presented on the Spring Garden Street Greenway. This is one of the most critical segments that Philadelphia is planning and is a major link between the Delaware and Schuylkill River Trails in addition to being the selected alignment of the East Coast Greenway.
The Spring Garden Street Greenway has been in the planning stages for at least a decade and now the City of Philadelphia has initiated their public engagement process during the month of December where you can be involved in the planning process by providing feedback and joining in on the discussions with the project team.
If you missed the Circuit Trails Action Team meetup, you can watch it below:
You can follow along with this presentation by visiting the Spring Garden Street Greenway StoryMap for all the details on the existing conditions and how to get involved in the planning process with your experiences along the corridor.
The most crucial aspect of the City’s public engagement process involves you visiting the Virtual Open House and participating with these three exercises before it closes on December 31st, 2020. To visit these exercises directly, visit the links attached to each exercise listed below:
- Exercise 1: Share your experience on the corridor by adding points of interest to the corridor on the map.
- Exercise 2: Choose where bicycle lanes should be located on the corridor by taking the survey.
- Exercise 3: Attend the virtual coffee hour scheduled on December 10th (This evening!) from 5-6 PM for a live Q&A by registering here.
Moving ahead, the Circuit Trails Action Team will be hosting the Delaware County meetup on December 16th from 6-7. To join this call, you can register here to receive the Zoom link. This will cover a number of trail updates including the East Coast Greenway and the Chester Riverfront Trail and will allow time after the presentation for a Q&A to learn more and how to get involved!
To ensure the region completes 500 miles by 2025, we encourage community members who are interested in this project to become a Circuit Citizen by helping us complete trails to date and growing toward its ultimate goal of 800-plus miles across our nine-county region.
For more information check out the Circuit Trails website to learn more about what’s going on in your county.
Following up on my other comment in the “How do you use the corridor” section, as a long time user of the SG corridor, I believe the most vital goal of a redesigned bike path here is to ensure it is protected from car traffic and from parked cars. I avoid it as much as possible because of the stress of looking for opening car doors, bumps in the pavement, and competition with a growing number of younger and less cautious bikers. It’s great to see so many young professionals using the bike lane but more often than not, they do not adhere to courteous bike behavior.
The center lane option (like the DC image would be the most dangerous of all UNLESS, it were protected by a curb and poles.
Thank you for opening up to the community to create a safe and user-friendly bike path!