Denton Trails Part 4: Five Pillars of Trail Success
What makes a good trail? Clear priorities. Read on to learn how my travels this summer have guided my view on what these key priorities should be.
This is part four in the Denton Trails series, a series that thinks through what a low-stress multimodal transportation network would look like in Denton. It draws inspiration from other trail systems, proposes core principles we could use in developing our own system, and envisions several trail concepts and how they could form the core of a bike and walk portion of our upcoming mobility plan. Please join me as you walk, scoot, or ride through these musings:
Part 1: Why Trails?
Part 2: City Trails Inspiration
Part 3: Recreational Trails Inspiration
Part 4: Five Pillars of Trail Success
Part 5 Concept: Locust / UPRR Trail
Part 6 Concept: Pecan Creek Trail
Part 7 Concept: University Trails
Part 8: 35E Crossing Improvements
Part 9: Concept: Downtown Connectivity
Part 10: Mobility Plan Integration
Part 11: Bond Election — Make your voice heard
Contrary to how I started this series, I’ll say this: A successful trail is not a particular type or width of pavement. It is not defined by a standard design manual. A successful trail is simply a route which connects people who are not in cars safely to where they want to go. The specifics of crossings, trail type, and road crossing methods are the tools used to achieve that goal. Trails are instead defined by what destinations can be accessed along a contiguous, safe, low-stress route that people would enjoy walking or biking along with their young child or their grandmother. Here are the five pillars I have noticed of trail success:
- Connect popular walkable or beautiful places
- Design creatively for affordability
- Design for a consistent level of safety
- Incrementally improve
- Maintain ruthlessly
Connect popular walkable or beautiful places
A trail that doesn’t connect people to destinations is an ineffective and underutilized trail. But what are some of those destinations in Denton?
- Downtown
- Universities: UNT, TWU, NCTC
- Large destination parks (North Lakes, South Lakes, Rec centers)
- High density residential areas
- Libraries
- Major employment centers
- Neighborhoods that are isolated by fast, high-stress roads
- Schools
- Natural riparian areas and waterways
Any trail that passes within a short distance of these destinations should make every reasonable effort to connect to them. Because of Denton’s growth pattern, we are fortunate to have a core walkable downtown in the center of our city. That suggests a network should consist of low-stress trails that meet downtown.
But it shouldn’t stop there. We should design trails around areas where we anticipate future walkable growth centers being developed. The Denton Plan 2030 envisions a compact growth concept with multiple walkable areas. This is happening downtown and near UNT to some degree, but where will our next walkable center be? As we saw from the investment along the Razorback Greenway, trails can be a catalyst for development because they bring people to desirable locations. When these areas are developed, these trail users then become customers and employees.
Beauty is paramount. Preserve existing natural riparian areas which provide the most enjoyable shaded trail experience — especially in hot climates such as ours. This improves our health, environment, and quality of life. But don’t blindly follow riverbeds irrespective of the places they connect. Use them creatively where they offer convenient routes between popular destinations, and connect them with other protected high-comfort, low-cost multimodal infrastructure to form contiguous routes.
Marketing also matters. Contiguous routes should be clearly messaged: name them, mark them with paint and signs, and provide a multimodal network map that clearly identifies high-comfort routes separate from lower comfort routes.
Design creatively for affordability
Crossing arterial roadways and freeways in Denton in anything other than a four ton pickup or SUV can be harrowing. The typical ‘Texas treatment’ for pedestrian or bicycle access is accomplished by one of two methods. The first option is to put a beg button on a signal that a pedestrian must push and hope the person can cross the road without getting broadsided by someone turning who isn’t used to seeing anything other than cars on the road. The other option is to build a $2.5 million bridge to allow pedestrians and cyclists to safely cross.
But what if there were cheaper, more creative ways? What if by thinking outside the box, we could afford a low-stress trail network that crosses these big roads at crossings which already exist by the use of drainage viaducts?
What if we could reuse existing traffic signals and ensure high trail user visibility, timing the lights with a trail only phase so that the risk of cars turning right or left into pedestrian or bike traffic is mitigated? Let’s give our civil engineers a challenge: Balance comfort, convenience, and cost to provide a trail network that is inviting and can be iteratively improved as trail use increases and warrants additional investment.
Are we willing to eliminate parking on one side of some neighborhood collector streets so that we can install protected bike lanes as a segment of some of our trails? Are we willing to reduce the number of lanes on some roads not primarily because there isn’t enough traffic to warrant the number of lanes, but because we value a safe, inexpensive trail network?
Design for a consistent level of safety
Choosing safe crossing types and low stress trail networks that minimize initial cost will be a challenge, but it is a necessary challenge. We must decide on a minimum threshold of comfort and convenience for the trail design, and then build a network. Aiming too high, as Fort Worth has done with a proposed system of trails with an estimated cost of over $4 million per mile, is too high. If Northwest Arkansas can do it for $1 million per mile, so can we. By keeping the per mile cost reasonable, we can afford to connect more places and achieve the first pillar more effectively.
A consistent level of safety is important because a trail’s experienced comfort level is based not on its average comfort level, but on its minimum comfort level. As a result, spending a lot of money to design a fancy section of a trail when the next section is much less protected may not result in more people walking or biking along the route. Designing for a consistent level of safety will yield the broadest network for the same level of investment, which will provide a more useful trail with higher usage.
Incremental improvement
After we have built out an initial network of low-stress routes that connects popular places, usage will increase. Road crossings that employ traffic signals will become more congested because people are using the trails. Trail users will want more amenities like trees, benches, and bathrooms. These growing pains are signs of a successful trail. A trail that attracts enough use that a grade separated crossing is warranted is a great thing. We do this in road networks all of the time.
US380 east of Denton has become a stop-and-go annoyance to many drivers. The reason? An increased number of homes in the area, and resulting increase in commuters along the 380 corridor, has caused increased traffic and a need for more traffic lights. To ease this congestion, TxDOT is spending over $120 million to widen and grade separate the major intersections between loop 288 and County Road 26, as they recently did with Dallas North Tollway and Preston Road. The point is this: we are used to upgrading road infrastructure when at-grade intersections are inhibiting regional connectivity. If a low-stress trail network is successful, we may need to make similar investments for trails also — but not initially. These investments become economically sustainable once these trails have increased economic activity and improved the quality of life for our residents. Building these networks incrementally helps us both be able to afford it and want to pay for it.
Ruthless maintenance
We must not neglect routine maintenance. From striping to signage to litter clean-up, to be successful the trails must be a pillar of pride rather than a forgotten wasteland. Denton has recently invested in keeping downtown clean by replacing ugly stinky dumpsters with smaller containers that are collected more frequently. A low-stress trail system must expect nothing less. Our volunteer stream clean and other litter removal events show that the community has pride in cleanliness, so let’s aim high.
Now that we understand some guiding principles, let’s start imagining what useful trails could exist in Denton. Next up, Part 5 Concept: Locust / UPRR Trail.
