The East Coast Greenway (or ECG) spans 3,000 miles, whisking hikers and bikers through the brick mills of Rhode Island, the urban waterfronts of New York City and the wetlands of North Carolina. It’s one of the most ambitious projects of its kind in the U.S. and hosts an estimated 50 million visits per year, making it one of the most popular routes in the world.
While its most beloved segments are secluded and separated from motorized traffic, as much as 65% of the ECG involves interacting with cars and trucks that are moving at high speeds. Most of the time, that looks like cycling on the shoulder of a highway. In some cases, it looks like the intersection where The Biking Fireman stood.
There’s nothing more than a painted crosswalk to demarcate a major trail crossing on the boulevard. No overhead lights, no eye-catching warning and, most tellingly, nothing in the design of the roadway to compel drivers to slow down. The posted speed limit is 25 mph, but locals laugh at the suggestion that vehicles travel that slowly. It’s a raceway, and at the high speeds observed, drivers have little time to react to the sudden incursion of a trail user. And trail users, no matter how vigilant and swift, run the risk of not being seen in time by someone driving in one of the four available lanes.
Stewards of the ECG understand how dangerous these parts of the trail are, which is why they install police officers at high-traffic intersections during organized rides, like the New York-to-Philadelphia Greenway Ride. They even refer to the segments that put trail users and cars in the same lane as “high-stress segments”:
Currently, our interim route in South Carolina and Georgia, includes a great deal of high-stress, on-road segments, predominantly…
