SAGA Examines Need To Make Communities More Pedestrian Friendly

ABINGDON, Va. – It’s not enough just to build trails like the Virginia Creeper, the host of PBS’s America’s Walking said at a conference here Friday; to improve health, communities must be built to facilitate walking and biking.

“They are not an amenity; they are a necessity,” Mark Fenton said of trails and greenways, noting that the obesity epidemic facing the nation is really a pair of epidemics: lack of exercise and poor nutrition.

With rising health-care costs and predicted decreases in life expectancy, Fenton said, localities need to create walking and biking transportation options for people who want to get safely around town – not just recreational opportunities for tourists.

“Yes, build that 20-mile connector along the railroad bed that you have access to. But don’t forget the quarter-mile connection that connects it to a neighborhood … or the 40 feet of pavement that connects it to a school,” Fenton said. “And don’t put up a gate there.”

The conference, the first for the Southern Appalachian Greenways Alliance, brought together folks from both sides of the state line – representing the public and private sectors – to discuss the need to make Tri-Cities communities more pedestrian friendly.

Tony DeLucia, chairman of the alliance, said the hope is that the conference will get a regional conversation going and spur support for interconnected trail projects.

“It’s been known since the ancients that trails are places where people congregate,” DeLucia said. “Exercise is the fountain of youth.”

U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, whose wedding was held on the Virginia Creeper Trail some years ago, praised the recreational trails that already exist in Southwest Virginia.

“I suspect it [the Creeper, which runs more than 30 miles from Abingdon through Damascus to Whitetop] creates greater economic value today as a recreation trail than it did in the time when it was an active rail line,” Boucher said. “I suspect the economy of the town of Damascus is far stronger today than it was at the time when Damascus was a home to manufacturing enterprises up until the 1970s.”

While the Creeper, which draws an estimated 200,000 visitors a year, has become the region’s poster child for successful trail development, Boucher also mentioned: the Salt trail, from Saltville to Glade Spring, which recently opened; the Guest River Gorge Trail in Wise County; and the Cranesnest trail under construction in Dickenson County.

Tourism officials are marketing these trails in tandem with two driving trails that cover much of the region: the Crooked Road, which celebrates the region’s music; and a network of artisan trails being developed to direct visitors to the studios of local craftsmen.

“Other trails in southwest Virginia are currently in the planning phase,” Boucher said. “We think we’re following the trails to a new economy.”

Jack McClanahan, chairman of the Southwest Virginia Regional Recreational Trails Authority, said a project to build trails for ATV riders also is in the planning stages.

“That trail system has become an economic engine to those until now economically depressed counties,” he said of a similar trail network in West Virginia, adding that it generates an estimated $100 million a year in revenue over a seven-county area. “They’re building restaurants, motels and even time shares.”

One benefit often touted of such trails is the potential to draw an educated work force – and therefore top-notch employers – by promising quality of life. But conference speakers also touted the entrepreneurial potential for local residents.

“I’ve been through now 24 budget cycles, and there’s never a good budget year … but that cannot stop you from forging ahead and planning for the future,” said Jeff Fleming, assistant city manager for development in Kingsport.

“Eastman [Chemical Company] … figured out how to make a better widget. We had to learn to do the same thing as a city,” Fleming said. “We saw ourselves in a very closed-minded fashion being a manufacturing town, blue-collar community, company town, that sort of thing, but then when Marriott comes in, they see us as a place to build a mountain retreat. Never in a million years would we have thought we were a mountain retreat.”

Rick Rose, producing artistic director for the historic Barter Theatre, spoke at the conference about the changing economy and the ties among the theater, the trails and other regional destinations.

“Every community needs to look at the new economy,” Rose said. “It affects us all. There is no stopping and there’s no turning back. We must learn from history, and we must not cling to it.”

Abingdon Town officials say they’re working on walkability within the town – though for every project that moves forward, another is waiting its turn.

“We do have a pedestrian improvement plan that we are looking at,” Town Manager Greg Kelly said, “and we have been trying over the past several years to do at least one major sidewalk extension each year.”

Fenton said even the Tri-Cities area is quickly suburbanizing – and communities must work as hard here as anywhere to give the next generation the opportunity to be “free-range kids.”

He said it’s critical because the need for walkable, bicycle-friendly communities parallels some major national political issues: the need to cut health care costs, global warming and dependence on foreign oil.

“The engineering field knows how to design places where bicycles, pedestrians and motor vehicles can co-exist,” Fenton said, “but we have to ask them to do that.”

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