I love rail trails and trails in general, but it’s a huge disappointment to me when they are paved. Besides the fact that asphalt is unnecessary and decidedly not beautiful, paved trails encourage cyclists to treat them like racetracks - a problem that ebikes will only make worse.
When the whole point of a mixed use trail is to serve as an alternative to roadways, paving them really gets my goat.
The strategy in my state seems to leave them unpaved except where doing so would cause excessive erosion, or turn them into mud pits. Segments that go through towns are often paved for this reason. The trails also have to handle snowmobile traffic during the winter.
Given that in the twenty years I’ve lived here, King County refuses to do anything with the 520 trail and those fucking tree roots through the Microsoft campus, I’d rather they’d left it unpaved. It is embarrassing to have a bike trail in such pathetic shape, especially when it is a busy transportation corridor through a major local employer. As an added irony bonus, it’s within the city limits of a city that laughably claims to be the “bicycle capital of the Northwest”.
But we have asphalt left over to pave a gravel trail that parallels another paved path a half mile away (Willows Rd. and the Sammamish River trail). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When the whole point of a mixed use trail is to serve as an alternative to roadways, paving them really gets my goat.