The Cady Way Trail: An Investment in Humanity

2016 marks a quarter of a century since Orlando, Winter Park, and Orange County completed plans for the Cady Way Trail, Central Florida's first bike trail.  Like the Cady Way Cycle Track, it was a tortuous two-year process to turn a plan into reality.  I devoted a semester to the project, directing the analysis of 25 Environmental Studies seniors who produced a 100-page document.  Included in the study was:
1. The project's anticipated economic benefits
2. The connections that could create a regional bike system.
3. Points for resolving conflicts with property owners.
4. A plan (with costs) to line the trail with native plants.

Students presented the report to the Orlando Parks and Recreation Board.  It was a valuable experience for the college seniors.  Studies show that completing an indepth project and presenting it to a group outside of academia develops essential job skills.  The student research also helped  planners in Winter Park and Orlando make their case.

I had studied the Pinellas Trail (it is the focus of "Recycling Eden," a chapter in the book, Visions of Eden), and I knew that property owners would be wary of building a bike trail on a defunct rail line near their homes.  This issue quickly came to the fore at a neighborhood meeting held at Winter Park High School.  "I'm afraid some one will rob my home and use the trail as a getaway," a resident claimed.  My response, "You are much more likely to have a criminal rip you off and escape on an abandonded right of way."  I followed with an account of how residents living next to the Pinellas Trail residents had the same concern, but once the bike trail went in it became a valued amenity.  It not only raised property values, but a number of homeowners redesigned their lots to provide better access to the trail.  Today realtors list 13 properites for sale on the Cady Way Trail, a selling point for a linch pin in a growing regional bike network.

Map of regional network on Cady Way Trail

A shift in the federal funding of transportation projects in the early 1990s (the Inter-Surface Transportation Efficiency Act) made it possible to span highways and link trail systems.  The bike bridge over Semoran "Boulevard" (using boulevard to describe State Road 436 deserves a law suit) was crucial to the success of the Cady Way Trail, as few humans would brave crossing the six-lane arterial.  I was reminded of the chaos that ensues on SR 436 when the flashing lights of a highway patrol car caught my eye as I biked over the highway on an otherwise calm Saturday afternoon.  The four car accident pictured below marks another round of statistics in a metropolitan area where someone dies every 44 hours in a traffic death.  The carnage also reminded why Florida suffers the highest bike death rate in the nation.

4 car collison viewed from Cady Way Bike Bridge

The 436 bike bridge cost $5.9 million to build.  This is relatively cheap when considering that FDOT has allocated $770 million dollars to "improving" the State Road 408-Interstate 4 interchange since 2006.  In other words, FDOT could build 130 bicycle bridges for the cost of one interchange.  The math is simple, an easy lesson in understanding why death comes more quickly to bicylists in Florida. To add insult to literal injury, FDOT claims the $2.1 billion being spent on Ultimate I-4 will enhance  "livability."http://i4ultimate.com/project-info/ Given that Metropolitan Orlando suffers the highest pedestrian death in the nation (followed by Tampa Bay, Jacksonville, and Miami) what FDOT means by livability is open to conjecture.  For a fact, it does not match the definition the City of Orlando employed in its sustainability plan: neighborhoods with “complete streets and green public spaces” that “encourage walking, public gathering and neighborhood-oriented shopping activity.”

Tax Dollars Employed to Improve 408 Interchange in 2006

Obviously, FDOT's concept of livability runs counter to good planning.  In 1926, Lewis Mumford warned that the trend towards engineering cities to the scale of the auto constituted "a kind of barbarism." It covered the landscape with "a machine-made fabric, increasingly standardized, regimented, characterless, spreading outward by a process seemingly as automatic as the spread of grassland, forests, and jungles in nature."  The soul of the city was being lost.  "Traffic and commerce are the names of the presiding deities, human beings...merely units," Mumford concluded, "designed to run or use elaborate mechanical devices." 

FDOT's worship of traffic efficiency has severed the souls and cost the lives of too many Floridians.  I am looking forward to returning to Portland, where I do not have a car.  My machine of choice is "Man's Most Perfect Invention," the bicycle.http://i4ultimate.com/project-info/ I am just thankful that a generation ago a small group of Orlando city planners had the vision and determination to invest in humanity. 

For more on Lewis Mumford, see "The Sacred City," The New Republic January 27, 1926 and Donald Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life