this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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I love and use rails-to-trails myself, but I can't shake the feeling that they're essentially motornormative culture scapegoating cyclists to bury any possible hope of reviving rail networks. The carbrained planner says "No you can't put the rails back in, you'd displace the cyclists!" While displacing cyclists every time they choose to exclude cycling infrastructure on streets.
I have similar feelings bit ido tell myself this: If nothing else rails to trails maintains the right of way. The carbrained city planner says you'll displace the cyclists, but in 30 years that planner will be retired or dead. What would kill railroads forever would be carving up the ROW and selling it off.
Occasionally, in my most cynical moments, I have the same thought.
They also feel like something designed by someone who hasn't ridden a bike since they were 16.
I get it. "Might was well" use land where the right-of-way is already clear, etc. But a miles of straightaways followed by gentle curves designed for a train don't make for a very engaging bike ride. I'm sure this could exist, but I haven't been on any that would actually be useful as bicycle infrastructure. They mostly go from nowhere to nowhere and there are few options to get on or off the 'trail'.
Straight cycling routes with gentle curves and low grades and few intersections are great, what are you talking about? So much better than bike paths crammed next to a road or river with random twists and turns to get around car infrastructure, or worse, winding and convoluted neighborhood routes with lots of stop signs that make it take forever to get anywhere. If a trail goes from nowhere to nowhere, it would probably not have gotten frequent rail service anyway and is still useful to some people as a bike path.
I suppose it helps I’m on a fast ebike though and want to make my 11 mile commute in a reasonable amount of time.
The bad ones I've been on are:
I have a proper bike trail in my home city that goes along a river and it's amazing that it winds along for dozens of miles with stuff to look at and breezes. You're not confined to a corridor with overgrowth on both sides causing stifling heat that's trying to imitate a highway. It's a pleasant commute if you happen to live along it and a relaxing recreational ride if you're not.
I might've come off harsh, I do generally like rails-to-trails. They're better than nothing, and you're right that having an ebike takes the arduousness out of it, but they're very much a hand-me-down version of proper infrastructure. I would rather have the passenger light rail service.
In the 1900s the small MS town I'm thinking of had a few hundred people and a rail station. You could pay the inflation adjusted ~$15 for all the transfers to go back and forth to the coast ~100 miles away. We didn't discard passenger rail in the US because it wasn't useful, but because it was hard to extract profit out of the public service.
While I agree with the guilt of enjoying rail trails