Trails for Illinois - Every home a trailhead!

Shocking disclosure—this ain’t Trails for Illinois’ home on the web. It’s more like the trailer office at the construction site. We strive for comfortable and friendly here on our temporary Tumblr, but it isn’t home.

The place we have our eye on is charity:water. The stories are up front. The mission is clear. Engaging with the organization is easy and rewarding.

I know some of the things we’ll need from our web strategy to build communities of trail users and support trail champions statewide: a Tumblr-like blog where anybody can share their great trail stories and pictures; a library of trail resource materials that can be rated, tagged, added to and commented on by users; integration with a social fundraising platform; and a big “Quick Trail Break” button that randomly sends the visitor to a website for one of Illinois’ many regional trails.

The button’s actually my favorite idea. But communicating the trail experience, and its potential to improve lives—sharing the stories—will be the core of our communications and web strategy. 

We’ve already attracted some great design and web coding talent to help us roll out our web home in the first week of October. But how about you? You might have in mind the killer web feature every trail organization is missing. Bring it forward! We are totally open to receiving house warming gifts!

I know, two posts in a row about the same trail. But Susan Lafferty captured a lot of wonderful #TripleBottomLine aspirations in her story about the public wayfinding & amenities workshops. 

Trails for Illinois believes that any trail that is 1) accessible, 2) well-connected, 3) inviting, and 4) offers adventure, can provide multiple, complimentary benefits that physically, materially and spiritually improve people’s lives.

Trails for Illinois believes that building trails to return value on a Triple Bottom Line is the best and highest use for trail funding, and for our own time and resources. The  trails we promote, program, plan and fight for must meet a Triple Bottom Line. It will be our screen and our guide.

Design meetings, open to the public, have begun for the Calumet-Sag Trail, the biggest trail project I’m directly involved with at the moment, and easily the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done professionally.

My involvement with the Calumet-Sag Trail opened the world of trail advocacy and development to me, and formed my belief that trails are a powerful motivator for people to recreate, to travel, to live differently and better than they would otherwise. And the communities along the Calumet-Sag Trail taught me that people want their trail experience to begin at their doorstep, not with a car ride. That means creating safer on-street connections between trail, business, school and home. Trails so often are the missing link between changing people’s attitudes and behavior and the efforts of non-motorized transportation advocates. Trails for Illinois is going to connect the two.

Your input at these design workshops will help shape how the Calumet-Sag Trail connects to the corridor’s communities. Please try to make it, or take 10 minutes to complete the on-line survey.

Trails for Illinois helps to build trails that return on the Triple Bottom LIne—economic impact, health & wellness, and environmental sustainability. That often means large trails and systems that connect to one or more communities.

But sometimes, the little one mile connector can create a lollapalooza Triple Bottom Line effect when it connects the right thing, like two regional trails. Go Wilmette & FPD of Cook County!

Do you want to live near this? Do you want to live with more of this?

The U.S. House chose this as the cover for their federal transportation proposal that will set a direction for America for the next six years. It’s even more bleak inside…cycling, walking, and recreational trails are, to this Congress, “frivolous.”

Okay, do this: check out this Flickr set from Friends of the Calumet-Sag Trail. I’m helping them produce a capital campaign video, and we were out on the Forest Preserve District of Cook County’s Thorn Creek Trail during a beautiful evening last night getting footage.

I want to live near more of that. Trails for Illinois holds as a core vision that every doorstep in Illinois becomes a trail head. That means expanding the Illinois trail network to every community, and helping those communities create safe walking and biking connections to them.

Polls show that America wants this. You do, too.

Federal funding of trails is helping us create the Illinois we want. Look at this: theLeague of Illinois Bicyclists posted a list of the biking and walking facilities funded in Illinois since 1991, the first year the U.S. began allocating funding specifically for biking and walking facilities.

Find your favorite trail project on that list. Imagine being outside on a day like today, moving along it, breathing deeply. It feels like living, doesn’t it?

Now look at that cover again, and know, deep down, what is at stake.

Then act. Give League of American Bicyclists five minutes of your time today to be a part of their mobilization to fix this denuded vision of transportation in America.

Do it for trails in Illinois!

Personal safety on trails gets poo-poohed too often by trail advocates as a valid reason to not use them; generally, the data is in our favor. But as I learned from Officer Chris Davala at Rails to Trails Conservancy’s Urban Pathways Symposium in 2010, all safety is really about perception of safety. I know the reason Chicago’s Major Taylor Trail receives so little use is that many people in the neighborhoods it connects feel it is unsafe. The visibly poor design by the city and disinterest in maintenance by the park district get noticed by trail users and avoiders alike, and contribute mightily to lowering a person’s comfort level and perception of safety.

Maximizing users on Illinois trails is a core activity of Trails for Illinois. That means helping communities design and maintain trails to meet the problem of safety perception head-on. Favorable crime data won’t encourage people to come out when their eyes and intuition tell them to stay away.

In many states, sin taxes are funneled to opportunities for a healthy, higher quality of life. The proposed penny per ounce tax on soda pop in Illinois would make an outstanding source of funding for building healthy, active infrastructure like multi-use trails in Illinois. And the timing is right too as Congress continues its war against common sense transportation spending.

Mmmm…donuts—Tour de Donut this Saturday in Staunton, Ill. gives riders 5 minute time credit for each donut they can eat at rest stops. Funds raised help support the ITS Trail—http://its-trail.org

Friends of the Trails and Quincy, Ill. get it: safe & connected routes for active living can be a cornerstone of stronger local economies, sustainable transportation choice, and a higher quality of life.

This is where I cut my teeth/earned my chops building a community and a movement around a trail. The Triple Bottom Line, a core value of the Calumet-Sag Trail, is a core value of Trails for Illinois now, too, as is equitable access for EVERYONE to Illinois trails. No one left inside!

We LOVE that Morton, Ill. is calling bike lanes “trail lanes!” For lots of communities, bike lanes are key to realizing Trails for Illinois’s vision of turning every door step into a trail head.