The Bay Area Trails Collaborative—”Developing a world-class interconnected network of regional trails benefiting all people of the San Francisco Bay Area.” –Rails to Trails Conservancy website.
The Appalachian Trail is 2,198 miles and crosses 14 states from Georgia to Maine. The Continental Divide Trail is 3,100 miles long and crosses five states from New Mexico to Montana. These are what we think of when we say “long-distance trail.” But if you stitch together the four regional/statewide trails in the San Francisco Bay Area along with important local connectors, you’ll find a +/- 2,600 mile network in the works that rivals those other, more famous endeavors.
Born in 2017 as the brainchild of the Rails to Trails Conservancy, the Bay Area Trails Collaborative (BATC) corralled representatives from city, town and county park and recreation departments, bike advocacy organizations, non-profit trail groups, and citizens interested in building a robust, connected trail network around the Bay in all nine counties and more than 60 cities.
And while it is impressive to report that nearly 60% of this massive network is complete, the remaining 40% is a real booger. The “low-hanging fruit” has been picked and the high-up fruit is weirdly shaped, surrounded by sword-like thorns, and encrusted in diamonds. Exhibit A: the west span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. When parts of the other, east span of the Bay Bridge collapsed in the 1989 earthquake, the Oakland to Yerba Buena Island (east span) bridge was replaced and included a bike/ped path after much ado (and “ado” is a whopper of an understatement). And that’s great but it only gets you half-way across the bay as the west span, connecting Yerba Buena Island to downtown San Francisco remains in its original state, sans bike/ped path.
The price tag for the “Bay Skyway”—a cantilevered path that would hang off the north side of the existing west span—is currently a cool $400 million. That is certainly the extreme end of things on the cost front, but it makes a point. To build out the remaining 1,200 miles of the Bay Area trail network is going to be a big lift. And for big lifts, many hands are needed.
As with most any major metropolitan region, the San Francsico Bay Area has a plethora of agencies and jurisdictions with authority/responsibility for the trails that make up this network, and rarely does any one of them have the resources to do all they’d like to on this front. To get a trail project built these days generally relies upon a slurry of funding sources—grants, beleaguered agency budgets, philanthropy—and all of the disparate trail interests mentioned above are competing for these same dollars.
Enter BATC who, according to the Rails to Trails Conservancy website believes that “By working together as a powerful multisector coalition, RTC and the Collaborative are leveraging the group’s collective influence and expertise to: advance policy and environmental change; share best practices; grow public and private support; accelerate trail development; and build a more diverse, robust trail movement in the Bay Area.”
From mapping the regional network (harder than it sounds…) to schmoozing elected officials, letter-writing to public engagement, the Bay Area Trails Collaborative seeks a bigger pie for all of the trails in the network.
“We want to create a new transit model that can be adopted around the country,” said Laura Cohen, director of the conservancy’s western regional office. “Let’s use trails to help us get to our climate goals and move beyond our reliance on automobiles.”
Hallelujah to that.
*While the author provides consulting services to the Rails to Trails Conservancy, her only compensation for this story is from The Cycling Independent. Everybody knows that cycle journalists are millionaires and don’t need to double dip.
