IMPACT: Shared-use path work continuesDate: 8/21/2023 For those who enjoy the outdoors, shared-use paths are a beating heart of the Western Massachusetts landscape.
They function as a more accessible and environmentally friendly tool for transportation, leisure and experiencing the different landscapes. In many ways, they are a connector of towns and cities; people and places; spiritual and physical.
Many communities have embraced the importance of these recreational tools while others are in the process of designing and constructing more in hopes of better connecting the commonwealth and surrounding region. A lot has been done so far, there is still more work to be completed before Massachusetts’s shared-use paths are completely conjoined.
Current projects in the process
Amanda Lewis, the director of MassTrails, told Reminder Publishing there are over 100 miles of shared-use paths in Western Massachusetts, which are paved surfaces that are both firm and stable and “accessible to all,” including those who bike, walk or cycle.
“These can be a part of a larger regional network, or they might be just a standalone shared use path that is within a community,” Lewis said.
According to Lewis, there is a MassTrails team that meets biweekly consisting of representatives from the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and the Department of Conservation and Recreation. These representatives are part of agencies that plan, design and build trails throughout the state.
Recently, Lewis said the team has put together a priority trails network map that showcases what trails are built throughout the state and which ones are in various stages of planning and design.
According to that map, there are 125 miles of trails in Western Massachusetts, and about 60 miles of trails within that vision are already built. Around 30 of those trails that are not built are currently in the planning or design phase, according to Lewis.
“There’s a concentrated effort on about four regional trail systems in Western Massachusetts,” Lewis said.
In completing these trails, the hope is to connect various areas of New England, including eastern Massachusetts to Western Massachusetts.
One of these trails is the Ashuwillticook Trail, which includes work done from Pittsfield to Williamstown and up through Adams and North Adams. Lewis said this trail was originally 11 miles, but there were some extensions built into Pittsfield.
Recently, Lewis said there was work done to extend Ashuwillticook up to North Adams from Adams, while Williamstown just finished a shared-use path around 2.5 miles that will also connect with North Adams.
“The hope is that once the connections are completed, you can ride from Vermont into Williamstown and then down all the way to Pittsfield and beyond eventually,” Lewis said. “That’s an exciting network that’s available for people to ride…it’s about 15 miles right now.”
Another big regional trail network underway right now is the New Haven and Northampton Canal Greenway, also known as the Manhan Rail Trail. This one stretches down from Southampton to Westfield, as well as the Southwick border, before then running all the way to New Haven in Connecticut.
Right now, the trail is finished in Easthampton and Northampton, and back in the winter, Southampton purchased a 3.5-mile defunct railbed from the Pioneer Valley Railroad Co. for $340,000, which now allows the town to design and construct the Southampton Greenway, thereby connecting the Manhan Rail Trail and Westfield’s Columbia Greenway.
According to Lewis, the town is currently working on the design phase now with the help of Mass Trails. Lewis said that the New Haven and Northampton Canal Greenway will be an economy booster and also an environmentally-friendly mechanism for transportation.
“It’s becoming long enough and it’s connecting enough to become something that connects people from where they live to where they maybe need to be,” Lewis said. “People can get on their bike instead of into their car.”
The other two big regional networks is the Mass Central Rail Trail, which aims to connect Western Massachusetts to places like Hardwick and Boston, and the Connecticut River Walk and Bikeway, which runs through Springfield, Holyoke, Agawam, Chicopee and West Springfield. Lewis said the latter network is not fully developed yet, but there is a vision where 22 miles of trails connect all of those communities.
The Mass Central Rail Trail, meanwhile, is a 104-mile envisioned corridor that would connect Boston with Northampton. Many of these sections are complete, but Lewis said the state is starting to figure out how to connect the more challenging sections, right now. Places like Belchertown, Hardwick and Clinton are the ones specifically in the midst of that process.
“We’re encouraging communities to apply for grants and we’re offering technical assistance to help tat along with each community,” Lewis said.
According to a study done by the Norwottuck Network, a nonprofit organization from Florence, the buildout of the Mass Central Rail Trail would bring $182 million annually in economic growth, general health would improve, and annual trail usage would quadruple.
More specifically, there would be four to five million more people using the trail regularly and would lead to over 1,250 jobs.
According to the report, 55 miles of the trail are officially open with roughly 20 miles in the planning or construction stages.
“You build a long trail, and it’s going to have a meaningful economic impact in various realms for communities along the way,” said Craig Della Pena, the executive director of the Norwottuck Network in Florence. “Not just urban areas, but also suburban and rural areas too.”
Along with rail trail development, bike-ability in the region has been a focus for many municipalities as they have attempted to establish environments welcoming of bikers as benefits can be seen both environmentally and financially to communities.
In Holyoke, the city’s statewide funded partnership with Mass in Motion has given them a coordinator from the group focused on healthy living and active living in the city. Holyoke’s Mass in Motion Coordinator Stephanie Colón told Reminder Publishing works with the Office of Planning and Economic Development often in making sure the city has walkable and livable portions within its downtown.
“It’s really interesting because I live in the city so I work not only as my role in this job but like as an advocate for my own city,” Colón said.
In terms of the growing efforts in the region of establishing more bike friendly ways of riding through the city Colón added the Safe Streets for All program funded through a state infrastructure law. The program will award approximately $5 billion in grant funding to support regional, local and tribal government’s efforts to prevent roadway deaths and serious injuries.
Colón said through her position she has been involved in working with the Bike-Pedestrian Committee who are an advisory committee to promote walk-and-bike-ability in the city and advise in situations like this on what is best for Holyoke.
“It’s basically making sure that there’s bike lanes when streets are made or redesigned,” Colón said. “When people are able to walk or bike from place to place, that vibrancy connects to livability.”
Colón added the committee is a central part of her work as they work on outreach to the community. Often Colón is writing grants for the city to try and get in order to continue adding to the city’s streets including pedestrian lights, raised sidewalks and more bike lanes.
Colón said while downtown Holyoke is not the location for the city’s trails and more wooded areas, walkability is still important. She explained ongoing work with schools in the district to create and promote Safe Routes to School, another state program.
“That partnership is really great because our goal is to expand on Holyoke and making our streets more walkable and livable. That relates directly to health and how people are experiencing life. Not having the ability to walk anywhere does affect your health in a lot of different ways that people don’t see. Your mental health, your physical health,” she said.
For economic development, a walkable and bikeable city often means more business for businesses in downtown. Colón said they want downtown to be robust and have economic impact for the city and having the flexibility can lead to more people in the area.
“We want Holyoke to be a city where tourists can come to and also where we’re keeping residents here and not pushing them out,” Colón said.
Colón added Holyoke’s many one-way streets in the downtown area create some challenges in developing more bike lanes in the area. While it isn’t impossible to ride your bike in downtown Holyoke, many side street parking spaces and sidewalks showcase some of the issues in trying to later implement more bike lanes.
“It definitely is challenging because the way the city was set up years ago to now want to include bike lanes,” Colón said.
As you leave Holyoke there are bike lanes and nice options for travel out of the city and connecting to other communities in Hampshire County. A bike ride up Northampton Street can lead you to Easthampton and Northampton, two other communities also focused on bike-ability.
Northampton Planning Director Carolyn Misch has been with the city in different capacities since 2000 and said concerted efforts to create a bicycle plan started in the early 2000s. A plan was ultimately incorporated into an overall transportation component for the city’s sustainable plan originally adopted around 2008.
“Part of that plan included an analysis of dangerous intersections, dangerous road segments, ways that the city should be thinking about addressing bicycle safety,” Misch said. “That helped direct infrastructure improvements by the city so from that time forward we felt like it was important to have a plan and analyze what our resources are, what our beneficial resources are, where we’re lacking, where we need to make improvements and how do we prioritize those.”
Misch added there has been constant work to build from where they started with their bicycle infrastructure network not only for the flexibility it provides, but also for the environmental positives that come from a concerted change like this.
“It’s critical to the question and goal of reducing our carbon footprint. Making sure that we’re creating spaces that are safe for people to use alternative means other than their car, knowing of course that we’re still going to have cars, but we want to make sure that we’re providing space equally across all modes of travel, so bicycling and bicycling infrastructure is a really key component of that,” Misch said.
Misch said prioritization plans created to establish areas of need in the city led to grant funding for design and development. For example, the first project done through this plan was previous Pleasant Street improvements according to Misch.
“We added little segments of bike lanes. That was done with complete streets funding. As we sort of went through that prioritization list we were told we then had to redevelop our prioritization list and plan so we got funding from the state again to have an outside consultant to help us look at what we’ve accomplished, but here are the things we still need to accomplish,” Misch said.
Last year the city developed a new Complete Streets Project Prioritization Plan updated consistent with the Tier 2 municipal requirements of MassDOT’s Complete Streets Funding program. When the program first began in 2016, Northampton received $400,000 in 2017 and $78,605 in 2020.
One of the top-ranked priority projects the city is looking at is new bicycle lanes on New South Street from the bridge over the Mill River to the bridge over the New Haven and Northampton Canal Greenway Trail. This project includes bicycle lanes to eliminate the gap from the latter bridge to Main Street, a distance of roughly 600 feet.
This would require the removal of 14 on-street parking spaces on the west side of the street. The continuous bike lane would provide a safer connection to downtown for hundreds of residents who live along the South Street corridor. The estimate cost fort the project is $60,000.
Other projects listed as priorities include added bike lanes and traffic calming measures in the city, and adding downtown bicycle parking to be added to downtown due to a “dearth of covered bicycle parking.”
Ride share program Valley Bike offered a unique ride sharing approach to bike-ability in the region and was having success until the programs main service provider, Bewegen Technologies Inc., defaulted on its contact. Northampton was the lead community who was the contract agent between the vendor and Valley Bike.
“We are now in the process of needing to issue what’s called a request for information to understand which bike share vendors out there can provide us the services and what those services would cost so that communities can figure out how much money needs to be raised or identified,” Misch said. “All the leadership of all the cities and towns want a bike share that can succeed, and they want a new vendor to come and operate, but there aren’t currently funds so we can’t go out to bid for a vendor until we know we have the money in the bank.”
Misch said Northampton feels there should not be just one community in the driver’s seat for a regional program such as this.
“Bike share is part of the regional transportation system, it should be a regional entity that runs it and ultimately the best thing would be to have it integrated to our existing transportation system,” Misch said.
Conversations have been ongoing on what the best model would be for this solution. She added that none of the cities feel one community should be left in charge, so collaboration is expected in returning the regional ride share.
Overall, the region is focused on a greener and more flexible future for bike-ability due to its many positives to communities.
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