UAlbany's Department of Geography, Planning, and Sustainability Graduate Shares Research About New York State’s Lost 2,000-mile Bike Network

Erica Schneider, a graduate of the Department of Geography, Planning, and Sustainability, recently published a blog post with Parks & Trails New York exploring the legacy of New York’s late 19th-century sidepath movement. Titled “New York’s Forgotten 2,000-Mile Bike Network—and What It Can Teach Us Today,” the piece examines how early bicycle advocates successfully organized, funded and built an extensive statewide network of paths decades before the dominance of the automobile. Schneider connects this history to contemporary transportation challenges, showing how past models of rapid implementation can guide today’s efforts to expand safe, multimodal infrastructure, while also illustrating the need to avoid the past pitfalls of dispersed management and lack of dedicated funding for long-term maintenance.

The Purple Path on UAlbany’s campus is a perfect example of how development of a contemporary sidepath can transform transportation and recreation. From an initial vision by a Masters in Regional Planning Studio class to the construction of the heavily used 3-mile trail, the path now provides thousands of students and faculty with dedicated space to ditch their cars and walk, run or bike.

Read the full Parks & Trails New York article.