A Disaster Waiting to Happen: Where Our Greenways Meet Our Highways
The entrance to Lenape Park, where the East Coast Greenway meets Kenilworth Boulevard.
In August, New Jersey first responder Stephen Dunn, known on social media as The Biking Fireman, addressed his Instagram followers from the entrance to Lenape Park. The park houses a segment of the East Coast Greenway, the country’s longest biking and walking route. Where Steve stood, that route is bisected by the four-lane Kenilworth Boulevard. Behind him was a mangled bicycle, several police officers, and an uncertainty as to whether everyone involved in the evident crash was still alive.
Steve was visibly enraged. “How do we accept this? It’s ridiculous,” he said in his post. “It’s a highway running through our community and this...this is what happens.”
The East Coast Greenway (or ECG) spans 3,000 miles, whisking hikers and bikers through the brick mills of Rhode Island, the urban waterfronts of New York City and the wetlands of North Carolina. It’s one of the most ambitious projects of its kind in the U.S. and hosts an estimated 50 million visits per year, making it one of the most popular routes in the world.
While its most beloved segments are secluded and separated from motorized traffic, as much as 65% of the ECG involves interacting with cars and trucks that are moving at high speeds. Most of the time, that looks like cycling on the shoulder of a highway. In some cases, it looks like the intersection where The Biking Fireman stood.
There’s nothing more than a painted crosswalk to demarcate a major trail crossing on the boulevard. No overhead lights, no eye-catching warning and, most tellingly, nothing in the design of the roadway to compel drivers to slow down. The posted speed limit is 25 mph, but locals laugh at the suggestion that vehicles travel that slowly. It’s a raceway, and at the high speeds observed, drivers have little time to react to the sudden incursion of a trail user. And trail users, no matter how vigilant and swift, run the risk of not being seen in time by someone driving in one of the four available lanes.
Stewards of the ECG understand how dangerous these parts of the trail are, which is why they install police officers at high-traffic intersections during organized rides, like the New York-to-Philadelphia Greenway Ride. They even refer to the segments that put trail users and cars in the same lane as “high-stress segments”:
Currently, our interim route in South Carolina and Georgia, includes a great deal of high-stress, on-road segments, predominantly on U.S. Highway 17. Our team is working with local municipalities and agencies to improve conditions in the region, but we strongly advise against riding these high-stress segments at this time.
One day, the entirety of the ECG will be a safe, enjoyable ride for anyone from age 8 to 80 and the Greenway’s champions are chipping away at that goal every day. Yet, with so much of the ECG being a destination for both recreational and commuter usage today, what are municipalities and states doing to ensure that the greenway is safe in its current iteration?
It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way
The trail crossing behind Steve was only constructed about 10 years ago, he tells me. He, like the majority of the ECG’s users, appreciates it, but he can’t help but dwell on the missed opportunity for a safer — and even more logical — connection. “This could’ve connected to the Olmstead Greenway on the other side.”
Today’s crossing isn’t intuitive for trail users. “We dump these people out on the busy road … and what happens now [is that] people don’t come down the crosswalk anyway,” he explains while guiding me through Google Maps. Trail users are expected to zig-zag through narrow sidewalks to reach the designated crossing, which itself doesn’t inspire a sense of safety. Instead, most people cross directly where the woodland trail meets the street. “I see this all the time,” Dunn adds.
In 2018, a 65-year-old New Jersey resident was biking along the ECG nearby, not realizing it was about to intersect with an arterial. He rode right into a tractor-trailer and died soon after. At the time, there was little warning trail users and motorists of the impending intersection. Not long after that crash, however, stop signs popped up on the trail. It was a good start, but Dunn noted that nothing about the high-speed road had changed. He could only see the one-sided response as a form of victim-blaming.
The crash reminded him of another local tragedy: the death of 16-year-old Emma Kleinz. “I spoke to Emma's father, Larry — a great guy and, you know, he's heartbroken — he felt like she was pretty much led to her death,” he said. “And just by looking at it, I feel that way too.”
Kleinz was attempting to cross a road not unlike Kenilworth Boulevard, except this road split off right after the intersection, effectively creating a slip lane. Debating who is more or less in the wrong is futile on a road like that; it’s dangerous by design. "She was scheduled to take a college placement exam, establishing the foundation for her future later that morning,” Kleinz’s father told Dunn. “We understood the dangers and we were extremely cautious and she was extremely well trained on various safety protocols, also being part of an advanced biking group, but [she] basically got caught in a trap.”
It was the type of intersection that was a disaster waiting to happen, and local officials knew it. Just a mile up the road, nearly $40 million funded a redesign after it was determined that the road was too dangerous for left-turning vehicles, he said. “But you’re asking pedestrians to traverse multiple lanes, not to mention another intersecting highway, with no signs or warnings. Even the retroactive treatments are probably not enough.”
Recalling these tragedies is painful in part because it’s easy for Dunn to put himself in their shoes. “My kid was biking here just earlier today,” he said in his video. Half a dozen comments beneath his post said something along the same lines — it’s an extremely popular trail, after all.
What makes it even more painful is that locals can’t help but see these tragedies as entirely preventable. Few are surprised by what Dunn described in his video. Speeding is second nature on Kenilworth Boulevard. Debris along the curb is all the evidence parents need to remind their kids to avoid the road when they’re out playing. However, it’s not a road that can always be avoided.
How Do You Change?
In a separate video, Dunn shared a small win on Instagram: “This intersection was basically 20-foot-wide travel lanes with no shoulders, and I was able to convince the county engineer to at least paint shoulders.”
He was standing at the intersection where the aforementioned 65-year-old was struck and killed. Except now, the 20-foot-wide lanes have been shrunk down to 11, with shoulders. “I don’t know if it made a difference, but it was something,” he told me.
Narrower lanes are the least he could hope for by the Lenape Park crossing. Reducing road width is one of many interventions that can compel drivers to slow down as they approach the trail crossing, though there's a good argument for reducing the number of lanes as well. With two lanes in each direction, even if one driver manages to stop in time, another may miss the memo. Worse yet, the stopped car can impede sight lines for both the driver in the next lane and the trail user crossing the road.
A decade’s worth of crashes and close calls should be reason enough to do something about the trail crossing by Lenape Park. And local appetite for change is clearly growing. The Kenilworth Mayor is reportedly interested in exploring a road diet, Dunn shared, and those residing in the homes on the park’s periphery have long begged for slower speeds — "Our kids play here!”
Yet, the fight to transform just one intersection, even with a bucket of paint or Jersey barriers, is long and peppered with obstacles. For one, who has jurisdiction over Kenilworth Boulevard? This is a straightforward question with a rather straightforward answer (in this case, the county) but knowing who owns and maintains the road doesn’t give you much leverage, even if you’re a well-respected first responder like Dunn.
County roads are beholden to county standards and priorities. Even though these roads weave through urban areas, parklands and residential subdivisions, their design doesn’t correspond to the hyperlocal realities of the places they go through. Often, they’re thought of as connectors between distant places, a means of getting from one side of town to the other, from one city to another dozens of miles away. As such, they prioritize the speed and throughput of vehicles in order to make that ride from A to B as efficient and seamless as possible.
The issue is not that some roads are designed to prioritize speed and throughput in general, but that the roads designed for this sort of efficiency are located in areas where speed and throughput are a fatal risk to everyone else. The most dangerous roads in our country are the ones where fast-moving traffic can easily interface with people walking and biking. This is reflected in almost every high-injury network map touted by cities that have adopted Vision Zero. The most crash-prone roads are the ones where there is a clear mismatch of priorities.
Despite how demonstrably dangerous these places are by design, county engineers don’t appear motivated to change them. “County and state transportation officials are sensitive primarily to their funding streams, which are closely associated with transportation as an economic development tool. Their very clear mandate is to make it easier for people to quickly get anywhere there is a business, or potential business (especially large, corporate enterprises),” Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn told me. “Anything else is an afterthought to that clear mandate, including safety.”
That doesn’t mean that change on these roads is impossible. Dunn already had success elsewhere. With renewed attention on Kenilworth Boulevard and tacit support from local leaders, he’s hopeful that something can be done sooner, rather than later. It’s an uphill battle, but the more vocal support change receives, the more likely an agency — even a notoriously obstinate one — is to respond.
You can keep up with The Biking Fireman on Instagram.
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Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.