Trails wander, connecting Madison County
By Paul Hampel
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Sunday, Oct. 23 2005

EDWARDSVILLE

Madison County has taken hits from critics as a so-called "sprawl community,"
where housing developments displace farm fields and residents waste fuel on
long commutes.

But with little fanfare, the county has established an eco-friendly and
practical network of blacktopped bike trails unmatched in the St. Louis area.

Local officials and real estate agents have begun touting the smooth paths as
amenities that rank with custom kitchens and walk-out basements, as allures for
home buyers.

"It's an amazing system and probably our best-kept secret," said Glen Carbon
Mayor Robert Jackstadt.

"After the quality of our school districts, I'd rank the quality of our bike
trails right up there with our access to interstates, as the county's No. 2
feature."

Over the last decade, the Madison County Transit District has acquired 115
miles of railroad rights of way, when rail services were terminated. It has
blacktopped 76 miles of rights of way at a cost of $20 million, with 69 percent
of the money coming from state and federal grants. And money has been set aside
to expand the network by 25 miles in the next five years.

In terms of length, Madison County's trails trump any in the region.

The better-known Katy Trail stretches 32 miles through St. Charles County, but
it's unpaved.

The 11-mile Riverfront Trail in St. Louis is the city's longest blacktopped
route.

St. Louis and St. Clair counties have several paved paths that are each only a
few miles long.

But what makes Madison County's network unique is its practicality: The 10
trails in the system connect communities at all points on the county compass.

"The beauty of the Madison County trails is their interconnectivity," said
Kathi Weilbacher of Trailnet, a nonprofit organization that promotes bicycle
and pedestrian activities in the St. Louis area. "You can use parts of
different trails to get to the same places you'd travel to in a car, and
sometimes they're even quicker.

"On the other hand, the Katy Trail and most of the others in the area are all
about riding straight out and straight back the same way you came."

Weilbacher salutes Jerry Kane, director of the Madison County Transit District,
for having taken advantage, in the early 1990s, of the federal government's
"rail banking" law, which allowed the lines to be used for recreation.

"Jerry had the vision and foresight to gobble those up as they were being made
available by the railroads. It was something the rest of us all missed out on.
So many (abandoned railroad rights of way) in St. Louis County were just handed
over to developers."

Kane said the county's original plan was to grab the lines for future MetroLink
expansion and to use them, in the meantime, as bike and pedestrian paths.

The district ended up getting enough easements so that future light rail lines
can run alongside the bike paths.

"Initially, there were complaints from people who feared their privacy would be
invaded," Kane said. "Today, the complaints are from people who want to know
when they'll get their spur (link) to the trails."

While Madison County was converting rails to trails, St. Clair County focused
on persuading MetroLink to bring light rail across the Mississippi River.
(Madison County voters rejected in 1997 a half-cent sales tax increase to
finance MetroLink expansion into the county.)

St. Clair County operates one paved trail, the MetroBikeLink, which runs
parallel to the light rail lines for four miles in the Belleville area.

"Light rail is where we put all our time and money from the mid-1990s on," said
Bill Grogan, managing director for the St. Clair County Transit District. "But
now we're focusing on a system of bike trails that can serve as feeders to
MetroLink."

Madison County is in the process of finishing work on two of the newer trails,
the Nickel Plate and the Schoolhouse Trail Connector, which will add loops to
the trail and should make it really hum.

Riders with stamina can already use Madison County's trails to pedal from
Venice all the way to Alton, about a 15-mile trek.

Meanwhile, a family in Glen Carbon can avoid traffic and parking with a short
bike ride to high school football games in Edwardsville.

Steve Brandenberg takes another path in the network, the Nature Trail, to get
to work. It's a flat, easy ride, just under three miles one way from his house
in the ESIC subdivision in Edwardsville to his office at Southern Illinois
University Edwardsville, where Brandenberg works as a facilities manager.

And true to its name, the Nature Trail brims with wildlife.

"I've seen box turtles, turkeys, deer, the obvious rabbits," said Brandenberg,
47, who started riding for the exercise.

"I wanted to build up my heart and my lungs and lose a few pounds. And all of
that happened.

"But the extra bonus was that my car just sat in front of the house. Gas was at
$3.19 a gallon, and I didn't have to start my car."

Trails boost business

As the trail grid expanded, so did business at Edwardsville Cyclery. The shop
recently moved from its cramped quarters in downtown Edwardsville to a building
with twice the space, at Center Grove Road and Illinois Route 159.

"The trails have certainly helped our business quite a bit," said manager
Andrew Thompson. "I'd say our business has just about doubled in numbers over
the past 10 years."

Thompson said that his store caters to families, who appreciate the safety of
the Madison County trails. Not only are the trails paved, they're off-road.
Bike riders - as well as rollerbladers, walkers and joggers - can travel the
trails without putting themselves at the mercy of traffic whipping past at
close proximity.

In fact, the transit district requires that all new through-roads countywide
include bridges or tunnels to accommodate trail users.

The safety factor won over Betsy Dowse, of Glen Carbon. She moved six months
ago from the Chicago area with her husband and their 4-year-old daughter to the
new Timberwolfe Estates subdivision, where home prices range from the low
$300,000s to the upper $400,000s. Their home backs up to the Nickel Plate Trail.

The family was initially concerned about privacy but now appreciates their
proximity to the trail.

"My husband's a marathon runner," Dowse said. "He runs nine miles out (on the
trail) and nine miles back and doesn't have to interact with traffic. And I
like that I can teach my daughter to ride a bike on a smooth, paved trail
without any worries about cars."

Some realty agents have begun to capitalize on the trails' burgeoning
popularity, said Gerry Schuetzenhofer, president of Coldwell Banker Brown
Realtors.

"Some of my agents have started to use the trails as selling points," he said.
"And developers are catching on, too. When they look into buying new ground,
they're also thinking about the trails."