In the 1980s I wrote a paper on the then-mostly-new recreational trails that had come into being in many North American cities. In most places, these trails were quite fragmentary. They were built where it was easy to build them, mostly along watercourses or (less often) in railroad or power-line rights-of-way or (even less often) along new highways or rail transit lines, and, in most cases, the different trails didn’t connect nicely with each other. Only in a very few places did these recreational trails form enough of a network to permit traversing the whole urban area on them, notably in Washington, Ottawa, Denver, and Calgary. In the case of Washington and Ottawa, federal ownership of a huge amount of streambank land–as well as two convenient canals with disused towpaths—helped account for the abundant trails. In Denver and Calgary, land along streams coming off the Rockies with highly irregular flow had been set aside as parkland early in the history of urban development, and this parkland could be utilized for linear trails fairly easily. In the original manuscript, I argued that the recreational trails constituted a distinctively new kind of urban infrastructure (although there were certainly precedents for them—Robert Moses, for example, built bicycle trails along some parkways in the 1930s and 1940s, and there was certainly plenty of infrastructure built for bicycles during the late-19th-century bicycle boom).
No one wanted to publish the paper, and, of course, there was no internet to send it to. I’d still stand by the basic thesis. The recreational trails (often labeled bicycle trails) that were being built in many places from the 1970s on really were in many ways a new and distinctive kind of infrastructure, and they’ve remained so as they’ve grown not just in North America but in urban areas all over the world.
It’s still true that recreational trails make up coherent networks only in a few urban areas, in North America generally the same urban areas where this was the case in the 1980s. Elsewhere, there are usually major gaps. This doesn’t matter in the way that it would, for example, for rail lines. There are usually ways for pedestrians, runners, and cyclists to move around even without formal recreational paths. But the alternate routes are often slow and inconvenient and can even be somewhat dangerous.
I was in Boston last September for the first time in nearly three decades. I’d lived in Cambridge in academic year 1966-1967 and had found myself in Boston frequently between 1976 and 1978. I had last been in Boston in (I think) 1989. I have tried to keep up with urban developments there, but that’s not the same thing as seeing for oneself. As always, I was particularly anxious to look for changes in non-automotive transportation.
Map of Boston and vicinity showing pedestrian facilities and rail transit lines. GIS data mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, heavily edited.
Boston is perhaps best-known among urbanists for the “Big Dig,” the replacement of an elevated portion of the Massachusetts Turnpike by a fantastically expensive tunnel, but starting in the 1960s several completely unrelated steps were taken to improve the area’s non-automotive transportation system, mostly under the aegis of the MBTA, a state agency. For example, the MBTA revived a complex system of suburban railroad lines that were on the verge of disappearing when I lived in Boston in 1966-1967. It took several decades of development, but these lines now attract approximately as many passengers every day as Philadelphia’s “commuter” rail system; in North America, only New York, Chicago, and Toronto have more riders on their suburban train systems. The MBTA also extended the Red Line subway in two directions between 1971 and 1985; it placed the Green Line near North Station underground in 2005; and it replaced the Orange Line’s elevated portions with tracks along the Boston and Main Railroad (in the north) and the main Amtrak line (in the south) between 1975 and 1987.1 It also built the Silver Line BRT lines, whose only really fast portion is an impressive tunnel from South Station south through the transformed South Boston Seaport area. Boston has certainly improved its “rapid transit” lines more between the 1970s and recent years than its East Coast competitors, New York and Philadelphia.
Boston’s recreational-trail network has seen much more modest improvements. Boston has a real problem. Its main central-city recreational trails run along the Charles River. This means that they do come close to the central business district as well as to Harvard University and MIT (although the route from Harvard is circuitous). The catch is that major highways run along the Charles too, Storrow Drive and its continuation, Soldiers Field Road, on the southern (Boston) side of the Charles and Memorial Drive on the northern (Cambridge) side. These roads, which go back to the years before the automobile came along, all started as modest parkways. They were designed for slow pleasure travel. But, because they served downtown and other important destinations, they became filled with cars as early as the 1920s. The city and state governments did a considerable amount of work to improve these roads in the 1950s. Storrow Drive acquired formal exits and entrances and became a freeway in all but name, although trucks stayed banned. (Lake Shore Drive in Chicago has a similar history.) Storrow and Memorial Drive and Soldier Field Road carry truly massive amounts of traffic in rush hour, and this affects the environmental quality of the recreational paths, which are generally right next to the roads. Only along the Esplanade (which abuts Back Bay) is there an alternate trail that’s somewhat removed from the highway. Although the recreational paths along the Charles attract numerous users, many people find them painful to be on and avoid them. I was doing a fair amount of running during the period in the 1970s when I was visiting Boston frequently and ended up deciding it was more pleasant and satisfying to run 3.6 km loops around Fresh Pond (in western Cambridge) than spend time running along busy Memorial Drive. I wasn’t alone.
The recreational path along Storrow Drive runs right next to an often very busy traffic lane.
Over the last couple of decades, Boston has definitely become one of the winners of the digital age. Gentrification in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville is widespread, and, of course, there have been tens of thousands of college students in the area for a century. The students and many of the people who have moved to Boston over, say, the last twenty years are likely to use recreational paths on a large scale, and governments in the Boston area have taken some modest steps to improve these facilities. They’ve repaved and widened the paths along the Charles and extended the Memorial Drive path into Charlestown. Memorial Drive is now closed to cars on Sundays, but, despite considerable pressure to extend closing hours, that’s the only step that’s been taken to reduce traffic. Boston’s prosperity may actually be helping to make traffic worse. The trails along the Charles are still Boston’s main recreational trails, and they haven’t changed substantially since the 1970s. They can still be plausibly seen as little more than sidewalks along very busy highways.
Boston has built some new trails, although, all things considered, they’re fairly modest.
The Southwest Corridor (late 1980s) is perhaps the most distinctive. This corridor, extending several kilometers southwest from downtown, was originally supposed to be used for a freeway. But, after the land was cleared, it became obvious that there was so much opposition to building a highway that the corridor was used instead for an improved Amtrak line, the new Orange Line, and a linear park. The neighborhoods through which the Southwest Corridor runs were (and to some extent still are) generally poor and needed the parkland desperately. The Corridor is usable as a recreational trail, but the fact that most cross streets have been left in place makes it a bit frustrating for runners and cyclists. Still, it is a new recreational path in a part of the city that didn’t have one.
The Southwest Corridor, Back Bay/South End. Further southwest, this corridor runs through much more modest neighborhoods.
More recently, in conjunction with the transformation of Boston’s old close-to-downtown port into an upscale residential space, there has come into being a kind of de facto recreational trail along the edge of Boston Harbor, from North Station (where it connects with the recreational trail along Storrow Drive), along the edge of the North End, down through “South Boston Seaport,” and (with some gaps) around South Boston and by the Kennedy Library. Much of this trail just follows sidewalks (and so it’s barely indicated on the accompanying map), but it’s marked with “Harborwalk” signs, and, in the North End, there’s an impressive protected bicycle path (which was being used by more runners than cyclists when I was there).
The protected bicycle path that runs around the edge of Boston’s North End. It appears to be used by runners and even walking pedestrians as much as by cyclists.
The Harborwalk in the South Boston Seaport. This area has arguably changed more over the last fifty years than any other part of Boston. The path can be so crowded that fast walking or running become impossible.
There are also several additional mostly suburban trails, for example, the 16-km-long Minuteman Bikeway in Lexington, Arlington, and Cambridge (1992 or so); the 5-km East Boston Greenway (2007); several bits and pieces of trail along the Mystic River; and a few other short segments as well.
Despite the existence of these new trails, it can’t really be said that Boston has acquired what anyone would call a network of recreational trails. It’s not very clear that it easily could. The area’s geography just doesn’t provide the kinds of lengthy, connected corridors that could be used for such trails, except along the Charles, where the existing trails are imperfect.
Boston is, of course, like most North American cities in this regard. Although it’s possible to fantasize about elevated bicycle and pedestrian routes, such facilities would be expensive to build, cast shadows, and perhaps be all too easy to throw things from. As a result, just about all recreational trails are built in pre-existing corridors. When such corridors are scarce or short or scattered, recreational trails along them are going to be fragmentary, and, where those corridors are used for major highways, trails that follow them are going to be marred by highway noise and pollution. This is true even in an urban area like Boston whose inhabitants would appear to be particularly inclined to support such facilities.
- The latter change had some negative consequences since the el ran through denser neighborhoods, but it definitely improved the physical environment. ↩