The Interstate Trail System

Another hare-brained scheme

Enough about cars. I don’t want to write about them, I don’t want to hear about them, I don’t want to see them, I don’t want to ride in them. I just want to ride my bike.

Okay, so Bozeman’s covered in snow and it’s not the easiest thing to do. Ah, well. A few years back I drilled machine screws into my tires, creating studded snow tires for my bike. They worked well on the ice, but they added a good deal of rolling resistance overall. Nowadays I just say winter is for cars, the rest of the year is for bikes.

Bozeman, with its university and masses of adrenaline-dripping outdoor recreationists, never seems to have a shortage of bicyclists plying its streets, even in winter. I’ve even seen a few extra-hardy souls panting their way sixteen miles up Bridger Canyon, a snowboard strapped to their backs. Clearly, some people are insane.

But it’s not like that in other parts of the country. Most notably California, where it’s warm and sunny much of the year (not to mention pancake flat in the places I’ve been). Despite ideal conditions, riders are hard to find. Well, not too hard. They’re all on the bike paths.

I suppose it’s not unreasonable that bicyclists are afraid of riding on streets. The streets are designed for cars, not bikes, and when faced with timed stop lights and turn lanes at every intersection, cyclists are clearly at a disadvantage. Would you want your small children riding around on busy streets? Probably not. Many kids grow up not knowing how to ride in traffic, so never do.

Despite given a great deal of lip service to how everybody ought to ride bikes to work and school and everywhere else, with modern traffic systems it’s highly impractical and unsafe. “Oh, take the bike path,” they say… but where does the bike path go? Quite possibly not where you want to go. Most bike paths seem to be almost exclusively for recreation, and not for commuting. Although there’s been heightened awareness in recent years, rarely do bike paths link communities.

So what’s my hare-brained scheme? An interstate trail system, just for bikes and hikers. It’s based on the idea that there are people who’d be perfectly happy not driving anywhere, if only they could do it safely and conveniently.

My original inspiration for this was the Appalachian Trail, a hiking trail extending from Georgia to Maine. While it’s certainly possible to hike bits and pieces of the trail, every year a few hundred hike the entire distance. I’ve been on parts of this trail, and it’s not easy. Brutal comes to mind, especially considering the size packs people carry with them.

So at first I was just thinking along the lines of an easier A-Trail, one that you could take a mountain bike on — following along the foothills, perhaps, and traveling through the middle of towns when appropriate. Naturally I wanted my trail, which I dubbed the “Bee-Line” (as an acknowledgement of the A-Trail’s superiority, as well as “B” for “Bikes”), to go all the way from Key West to the border of Maine and Canada. Someone suggested using old railroad right-of-ways… which totally makes sense, as the Rails-to-Trails program is already well underway across the nation.

There’s two keys to the Bee-Line: The first is tentatively mapping a desired route, but having a de facto route using existing roads that can be used immediately. It could take decades to obtain rights to the land and build trails, but as long as alternatives exist and people use them, it’ll provide impetus to carrying out the plan.

The second is that dirt is okay. In Calfornia every bike path I ever set wheels on was paved. Why is this necessary? Bozeman has a huge bike/hike trail system that’s completely unpaved, and there doesn’t seem to be any protest at all. Most bikes have tires fat enough to be right at home on dirt. The exceptions are the fancy pants skinny-tired road bikes, but those things go too fast for bike paths, anyway. They’re more at home on streets and highways. Plus, part of this concept is the natural experience, and asphalt takes away from that.

I chose Key West as a starting point specifically because there’s an old road that runs alongside the current highway, which goes the entire length from the mainland to Key West. Originally build as the part of the Flagler railroad, the rails were converted to a highway after hurricane damage. The current road replaced it in the early 80s, but it’s still there. And a lot of it is now used for a bike path, but the old bridges are in pieces — literally, chunks of them are missing.

It would be no small expense to repair these bridges to be adequate for bike and pedestrian travel. But when I think about the Interstate Highway System and the amount of money we put into our automobile roads and bridges, it strikes me as a double standard. Don’t we want people to get around in ways other than cars?

Right now I’m seeing a lot of interest in bike paths and trails covering short distances — which is great. But long distance bike/hike trails could spawn an industry unto itself, perhaps even revitalizing depressed small towns that are on the route. Along with the Bee-Line, there could be routes crisscrossing the nation, just like the Interstate Highway System. That was a bold, monumental idea for its time; I don’t see why this should be thought of any differently.