Trail Sections |
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- 25th St. Pedestrian/Bike Bridge - Descro Park - Famous Dave's - Lake Hills Drive - Riverfront - Shiloh Underpass - Stewart Park & The Big Ditch - Swords Park - The Midland - TransTech |
RiverfrontSpring 2002It's been a long time in the making, but we're finally going to see the continuation of the concrete trail along the Yellowstone River. It ends now under the Interstate Bridge, but will continue through Coulson Park by the river, then along the road by PPL and through the corner of PPL and Public Utilities, then continuing along Belknap Ave. and back to the river to Mystic Park. (Mystic Park is an undeveloped park located southeast of the Billings Utilities Water Plant). As you may know this section of the trail is included in the BikeNet Plan for Billings as well as in The Yellowstone River Greenway Master Plan. Part of this development will also include a portion of a bike route connector into downtown Billings along the South 25th St. corridor. This bike route will link into the historic Billings district along Montana Ave. close to the Depot with a monumental, historic, bike/pedestrian bridge crossing over Montana Rail Link tracks. There are a number of people in the Billings community working on this bridge project. Because of the inability to get several private property easements and because Montana Rail Link would not allow the crossing of their railroad spur in the area north of the Interstate underpass, we will not be able to complete this section at this time, but hope in the future this will become a reality. However, we are very excited about the portion that we are able to complete. The engineering design has been accomplished and the final approval and easements are near completion. We intend to go out for bids for construction in the next several weeks with hopes that we can build this trail segment during the summer construction season. This will add several miles to our trail network and hopefully will stimulate the community into wanting even more trails. Our long range plan is to have a network of trails throughout the Billings community, connecting neighborhoods with our natural areas such as the Rims and the River and with schools, libraries, parks, museums and commercial centers, thus providing our citizens with many recreational opportunities as well as an alternate transportation corridor. As we saw with the existing trail, there will be many opportunities for the community to step forward and help add special amenities to this trail connection with tree plantings, picnic tables, benches and kiosks. Yellowstone River Parks Association with the help of many volunteers has been instrumental in accomplishing many of these grassroots efforts of enhancements to the trails.
This trail addition will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.3 million dollars. The brunt of these monies come from the federal CTEP (Community Transportation Enhancement Program) which requires a local match. Part of this match is from the bond issue that was passed in November of 1999 for the trails. The section of trail between PPL and Mystic Park received federal appropriations from the TCSP (Transportation, Community & Systems Preservation fund) with additional monies from a Recreational Trails Program grant, Montana Community Foundation grant, Bikes Belong grant and a contribution from Conoco. We are very grateful for all the funding sources we have received and realize how important all these programs are.
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