Talking Headways Podcast: Greensboro's Downtown Greenway - Streetsblog USA

The Downtown Greenway in Greensboro, North Carolina, opened its final section after 25 years of work. The route includes art installations and connects segments that run independently, alongside roads, and within sidewalk areas. Ensuring full connectivity relied on two local opportunities that reduced right-of-way acquisition costs. On the east side, a six-lane divided highway with low traffic, Morrow Boulevard, allowed conversion of a full lane because the city owned the roadway. On the west side, a railroad corridor with one commercial user enabled a rail-to-trail conversion after persuading the user to stop using the line. Additional right-of-way needs were limited to smaller property purchases, while rail conversion still required payment.

"We had two opportunities in Greensboro that made us think this was possible to do in a way that maybe some cities wouldn't be able to do. If you had to purchase all of the right-of-way for this, in your center city, the cost would be prohibitive. But in our case, we had a six-lane divided highway, Morrow Boulevard, which did not carry a lot of traffic on it. We knew we could take at least a full lane of traffic out of that to convert, so we did not have to do right-of-way purchasing for that because the city owned it. That's on our east side."

"On the west side, we had a railroad corridor that had one commercial user, and we had the sense that maybe we could convince that user not to use it any longer, and we could do a rail-to-trail conversion on that line. We were successful with that. We did have to pay for that. We were naive in the beginning, thinking that the railroad might just abandon it. That's not how it works."

"I will say that we did not have to do as much right-of-way acquisition as you might imagine. It was more kind of little bits and pieces that we might need here and there. There were a few properties. One of"

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