DART and trails in Richardson
Ian McCann, in The Dallas Morning News, reports the good news that "Richardson plans new trails to link to DART stations."
A new trail will provide access to the Bush Turnpike DART station, up to now isolated from all commuters except those who can get there by car or bus.
A new trail will connect Renner Rd with the Galatyn Park DART station. There's already a trail that does that, the trail meandering through Richardson's gem, the Spring Creek Nature Preserve, but some people have complained that they don't want to walk through the woods, especially at night. Now, they'll be able to walk a new hike/bike trail alongside the new Routh Creek Parkway. Sure, the new road scars a beautiful nature preserve, but if it caters to cyclists and walkers, too, maybe it is an acceptable balance of competing careabouts.
And there's hope for a new trail along the Cotton Belt rail line, which will eventually be home to an east-west DART line across Richardson.
All of this trail activity in Richardson is just a small piece of a much bigger network of interconnected trails across North Texas. The bigger network even has a catchy name, a veloweb. What's a veloweb? Dictionary.com has never heard of the word. Google can't define it. But the North Central Texas Council of Governments is promoting the term to describe the "644 mile, designated off-street trail network that has been planned to provide bicycle and pedestrian connections in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex."
Some people flinch when they hear the word metroplex. Veloweb sounds like the kind of word with the potential to irritate people, too. Here's hoping the word veloweb becomes as common as metroplex, for it will mean that the vision of that 644 mile network of hiking/biking trails will have become a reality.
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