Author: Larry Glantz

Multi-use paths are being added to cities across the country at an exciting rate and more people are using them. That’s a great thing. But crowding can lead to conflict. To stay safe, and make the experience more enjoyable for everyone, here are a few guidelines for blisfully sharing bike paths with fellow cyclists, joggers, dog walkers, and everyone else.

1. Get out of time-trial mode, duh. It’s fun to go fast, but a bike path isn’t the place to seek a KOM. Yes, you can crank things up a bit if you have clear sight lines and few other users but, as a general rule, keep it under control.

2.  Ride right, pass left. Act like a car in these situations. Right for travel, left for passing. And, of course, obey all traffic signals.

3. Slow down—and be prepared to stop—when there are others around. People are unpredictable. Kids and pets especially, but the truth is, anyone can be so involved in a conversation or wrapped up in their own thoughts that they’ll make a bad choice even if they hear you coming. Slow to a walking pace and keep your hands on your brakes.

4. Make some noise well before passing. A bell is more charming(and less startling) than an “on your left!” but either is preferable to a stealth pass. Make noise—be sure you’re heard—well before you reach the person you’re passing.

5. Look around (and signal!) before passing or stopping. Just because you’re doing it right doesn’t mean everyone else is. Before you swing left to pass or hit the brakes to stop, throw out a hand signal, and take a look behind you for oncoming traffic.

6. Don’t stand in the path. Sometimes it’s nice to stop and look around and take a drink. Pull off the path when you do so, otherwise you’ll block the way for everyone else. 

7. Be nice. It’s the most important thing. You’re representing cyclists as a group. Don’t be a stone-faced automaton hell-bent on maintaining your 19.5 mph pace. Treat people the way you want to be treated. Be friendly. Wave. Say hello. It will make all of our time on these super paths a little more fun.

Read the entire article on-line here.

By LIZ GOTTHELF, Staff WriterA new local initiative, Treetops & Rooftops GIS, is bringing on demand tours of local points of interest.

Treetops & Rooftops, an initiative of Saco Bay Center for Civic Engagement and created by volunteers, has developed a pilot program with three audio tours – historical tours of Pepperell Park in Saco and The Pier in Old Orchard Beach and an audio drama that takes place at a segment of the Eastern Trail in Biddeford behind Southern Maine Health Care.

The tours can be found by going to the Saco Bay Center for Civic Engagement website, www.sacobaycenter.org. Project leader Melissa Field secured the use of a mapping system developed for the Eastern Trail to allow smartphone users to access the audio tours.

“You can take the tour anytime,” said Fields.

Local historian Catherine Glynn worked with students from Katy Nicketakis’ French class at Thornton Academy to develop and narrate the Pepperell Park tour, which includes history of the park and a poem written in 1900 by William Grant Brooks.

The tour was translated by Thornton Academy French students as a class project, and narrated in French by two student volunteers.

Thornton Academy senior Taylor Lamarre said she volunteered last school year to dictate part of the recording because she wants to become more fluent in French.

Lamarre said the project was a lot of fun to work on and she learned a lot about Saco.

“It sounds really, really good: Better than I expected,” she said. “I think it’s really cool that a lot of people are going to be hearing this.”

Read the entire article online here

SPRINGVALE — A year ago Paul Schumacher and Lee Burnett began brainstorming over a question local business owners repeatedly asked: Could York County have more connecting trails?

Schumacher, the director of the Southern Maine Planning and Economic Development Commission, said the requests made sense: Trails help tourism, improve quality of life and increase the value of real estate.

So he got together with Burnett, project director at Forest Works!, which conserves forestland in York County, and began to examine the possibility of a large, interconnecting trail network.

What has resulted is a plan to connect the county’s trails using the Eastern Trail as the backbone. The ET runs through South Portland, Scarborough, Old Orchard Beach, Saco, Arundel and Kennebunk, but the goal is to connect it through Wells, South Berwick, North Berwick and Eliot.

How did this project start?

PS: At a meeting two years ago, local businesses kept asking about trails. It’s a quality-of life-issue, a quality-of-place issue. And York County does have a lot of trails on land owned by state agencies, nonprofits, land trusts, municipalities, and land trusts and water districts. What we realized was the (proposed) Eastern Trail here runs right through the center of the region. It could be the backbone of a larger trail network. So we applied for a grant with the Maine Outdoor Heritage Fund and received $12,500. We were able to use it to get a matching grant for $22,000. We’ve spent that data-gathering, mapping, gathering all the trails, using GPS to locate some of the trails.

In a way this was more than we were prepared for. We proposed a trail from the coast to Parsonsfield, near the New Hampshire border, creating an integrated trail system. That was the dream. Now we’ll need money to build the trail network.

LB: It’s challenging because there are a lot of property owners in southern Maine. And a lot of property owners don’t mind people on their land but they don’t want to open it up to the public and have people from Massachusetts littering on their land, or worse. It’s a lot more suburban here.

Read the whole article online here

Can Trails Make Rails Safer?
Annually 500 trespassers are killed in rail corridors.
With 142,000 miles of freight corridor, that s an annual fatality rate of One fatality for every 300 miles of rail corridor.
Not even one fatality has been recorded during the 40-year history of rails-with-trails for a pessimistically estimated annual fatality rate of One fatality for every 8000 miles.
Can we explain this 26-to-1 difference in fatality rates?
Americans, rightly or wrongly, consider rail corridors to be trails. If Rails are trails, they are terribly dangerous ones. They are also poor trails, awkward to walk.
Simply by providing a better, nearby trail, people apparently walk on the real trails thus reducing rail trespass fatality rates.