Cherry Creek Trail passes under power lines in Denver, Colorado
After a long hiatus, the Christmas Wish List is back.
This year it's going to highlight the potential that utility corridors - those that allow for gas or electricity lines - have for multi-use trails. Montgomery County has been a leader lately in recognizing this, but there are opportunities in Prince George's and Fairfax too (the inner jurisdictions, less so). Montgomery County required PEPCO to tolerate trails on their corridors in order to allow for the merger with Exelon, and in their recent Master Bicycle Plan they included several trails on utility corridors.
Utility corridors can be used for trails, but they aren't as natural a fit as railroad right-of-ways for trails for several reasons. For one thing, there aren't any in DC proper because power lines aren't allowed in the L'Enfant city. Another problem is that the land is often used by something else - farms, parking lots or golf courses - beneath or above. That's great for land use, but it makes adding a bike path through a corridor difficult. Finally, the nature of power lines is that they, unlike trains and bikes, can easily traverse rough terrain or bodies of water so there is no pre-existing earthworks like cuts and bridges to reuse. Some of the corridors stretch across 50 miles or more and adding a trail would cost many millions, take decades and require extensive negotiation with dozens of landowners.
Still, utility corridors can help to expand the trail network. They can help create a "breezeway" network that connects towns like the one Montgomery County is planning if they're capitalized on correctly. After all, one of the regions most popular trails - the W&OD Trail - was a utility corridor at the time the trail was built. Sure, it's best known as a railroad corridor - having hosted one for more than 50 years - but it then became a power line corridor before VEPCO sold the land to NVRPA to build the trail.
It's doubtful any of the corridors I'll mention over the coming days will ever be as popular as the W&OD or that any will become a bike trail in their entirety. Most aren't even vaporware at this point. But they represent a great opportunity for intercity biking and could be a boon to the communities they pass through.
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