Cross City’s Greenway

Last Saturday’s Chad Reed Memorial 5K race in Cross City gave me the opportunity to travel to a place where I hadn’t been before. In some ways, Cross City is pretty much like any rural little northern Florida town. But one thing stood out like a sore thumb: the Greenway.

The Cross City Greenway is actually a small section of the Nature Coast State Trail, part of a program designed to convert old railroad tracks into usable trails, and I experienced it firsthand: most of the race took place on it! As the trail's website indicates, the trail starts (or ends, depending on which direction you're going) in the cities of Cross City, Trenton, and Chiefland, with a "central" hub in Fanning Springs. I experienced it as a long stretch of relatively wide (one traffic lane in breadth) asphalt pathway generally running parallel (with some notable deviations) to US 19. I noticed it long before I entered Cross City proper. This is a remarkable asset for such a relatively small community as Cross City, or this entire very rural part of northern Florida, for that matter. Gainesville has a minor "rails-to-trails" version of a greenway, but it doesn't really go anywhere useful. I recall seeing a similar pathway (from the rooftop of my tour bus)…in extremely densely populated Manhattan, running along the East River and wonder whether that might also have been a converted railroad track. I hear that Knoxville, Tennessee, has something similar. As most likely do several of the bigger cities. But Cross City? CROSS CITY??!!

Unfortunately, I don’t think Cross City makes a lot of use out of its greenway. Except for the Chad Reed Memorial Run, I didn’t notice anyone using it anywhere. Man, could I use something like that here in Gainesville! You can bicycle, walk, run, dog-walk, skateboard, pogo-stick, you name it. In Cross City, it’s readily accessible from just about any point in town. If I could place such a greenway in Gainesville, I would have it run along West 34th Street from the northern tip of town to the southern borders. That way I could either run or ride my bicycle to and from work with a minimum degree of exposure to the loony tune drivers who plague this town! Of course, there would still be that touchy matter of crossing busy streets…