SkyscraperPage Forum - {SA} The Hike and Bike Lifestyle coming to SA (finally)

Bout time this happened! One more reason to love SA now!

First steps on bike trails

Web Posted: 06/11/2008 12:13 AM CDT

By Colin McDonald
Express-News

There used to be satanic graffiti along Salado Creek, and Diane Williams was afraid of what she might come across walking the shaded streambed.
“Now it's nice,” she said. “Lot more people.”

Instead of sinister characters, Williams and her husband met middle-aged mountain bikers, couples holding hands and children learning to ride a bike Sunday.

The first 2 miles of the Salado Creek Greenway will officially open in August. But locals like the Williamses already are filling the trails on weekends. They walk around the construction equipment and hop over the runoff barriers that are in place as contractors finish the concrete path that will be at the center of the park and completed in July.

The trail is the first part of what the city plans to make a 22-mile-long park dedicated to walking and biking — one more green space city officials hope will lure residents outside and promote healthier living.

The linear park is part of a $45 million, sales-tax-supported project that also will put 15 miles of trails along Leon Creek and 11 more along the Medina River.

Building the parks has been a pet project of former Mayor Howard Peak for more than a decade, and he envisions the paths connecting the city into a grid of corridors for pedestrians and nonmotorized vehicles.

“We are in a position where people are suddenly going to hear a lot of this is on the ground,” said Peak, now chairman of the Linear Creekway Parks Advisory Board, which oversees the construction of the parks.

When Peak was a city councilman in the 1990s, he went looking for land on San Antonio's North Side to turn into parks. He did not find much, but tucked between the crowded cul-de-sacs of the subdivisions were the streams and drainages the developers had to skip over because any house built along them could potentially be washed away.

Elected mayor in 1997, Peak pushed for walkways and bike paths along these waterways — a combination and expansion of the River Walk and Mission Trail.

In 2000 and 2005, voters approved a 1/8-cent additional sales tax for the city to use to buy land along the drainage corridors for trail construction. Until now, Peak and the board focused on purchasing those properties.

“People are going to realize, slowly but surely, that these creeks are assets,” Peak said. “They have always been considered liabilities.”

Now with most of the land secure, the city is starting the construction phase, with most projects slated to begin between 2008 and 2010 and be finished by 2013.

The end result will be more than 40 miles of trails allowing bicyclists and pedestrians to cover large swaths of the city while rarely having to deal with motorized traffic.

“We are behind” in making San Antonio bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly, Peak said, “but we are not as behind as one might think.”

Once the three big parks are in place, Peak said, his vision is to reach “critical mass,” where residents will be clamoring for more trails. He's eyeing the creeks' tributaries as places to build more trails. Then he sees those trails being combined with sidewalks and bike paths along the city's surface streets so people could safely navigate San Antonio without having to use a car.

“It's taken San Antonio a long time to realize that people really want quality of life,” said Ray Knox, president of the San Antonio Friends of the Park Association. “People want to enjoy their recreation.”

On Sunday, more bicyclists and dog walkers descended into the Salado Creek bed to explore the landscape. There were fathers leading their sons on bike rides and families walking their toy poodles by the live oaks and limestone cliffs.

“It's like a little oasis in the middle of a subdivision,” said Patti Hale, who rode the trails of Salado Creek for the first time that day. “It felt like you were 100 miles from San Antonio, but it's in our backyard.”