PATH Looking To Extend Freedom Park Trail to Centennial Park
Decatur Metro | September 24, 2011If you’re a Decatur-liver and a downtown Atlanta commuter, you may welcome this news – IF you ride (or fantasize about riding) a bike to work and you don’t break out in hives thinking about riding on the PATH trail.
According to Atlanta’s transport sage, Thomas Wheatley, PATH is in the final stages of extending the Freedom Park Trail down Harris Street thru downtown Atlanta to Centennial Park.
Two lanes of traffic along Harris Street would be removed to transform the road into a more pedestrian friendly thoroughfare with a 10-foot-wide bike path, a tree-lined buffer and new crosswalks.
Wheatley reports that the project costs around $2 mil and would be paid for by the PATH Foundation. Though it sounds close to becoming a reality, PATH is currently working with area businesses to address concerns about deliveries, if two lanes were taken out of Harris Street to accommodate the um…path.
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I like the tree-lined part!
I used to bike commute to downtown. This extension would be a good idea — the path currently ends far short of the downtown business district and spills you into a relatively unviting place to ride a bike. Decatur to midtown is actually far more pleasant despite the lack of any real bike paths along most of the way, though it has more hills.
If any of you are on the fence about bike commuting, though, as Nike would say, just do it. Spend the time to find the best route and once you start you’ll wonder why you ever drove in the first place.
This PATH extension will also help provide a better intro to ATL for downtown visitors. An out of town work colleague staying in one of the downtown hotels took a morning run, forgot to bring the specific running route rec’d by the hotel, and ran through a really not good part of town. Needless to say, her generally downtown oriented, unfavorable impression of Atlanta was reinforced. I took her on a drive down Ponce to Decatur and she understood a bit better why I live here- but not all visitors have an in town host. It’ll be great for guests to be directed straight to a great resource- Freedom Park.