A Ribbon of Path Between Two Small Towns: The LINK Trail Grows

If you drive the stretch of Somerdale Road toward Hi-Nella, you might not notice much worth stopping for. A few borough streets, some backyards, the ordinary edges of two of the smallest towns in Camden County. But walk it a year from now and you’ll be on something the county has been dreaming about for the better part of a decade: a paved, protected greenway where a family can ride bikes without their mother’s heart in her throat.

On August 3, Commissioner Jeffrey Nash stood with a shovel and a handful of local officials and broke ground on a 0.4-mile segment running from Somerdale Road to Wakonda Road, connecting Somerdale to Hi-Nella. Four-tenths of a mile. On a map it’s almost nothing. But that’s the thing about a trail. It isn’t built in the grand gesture. It’s built in these short, unglamorous stretches, one borough at a time, until one morning you look up and realize you can walk clear across the county without ever fighting traffic for the privilege.

The second piece this year

This little segment is the second piece of the Camden County LINK Trail to enter construction this year. The other, a heftier 1.1-mile run, is going in between Merchant Street in Audubon and Station Avenue in Haddon Heights. Crews expect the Somerdale-to-Hi-Nella stretch to be finished in about 180 days, which means that if the winter cooperates, folks could be walking it before next summer. The work is funded in part by a $525,000 Bikeways Grant from the New Jersey Department of Transportation — state money coming home to do something you can actually stand on.

The whole vision, when it’s done, is a 34-mile route threading through Camden County, a spine of trail that ties suburb to suburb the way the old rail lines and creek paths once did before we paved everything over for cars. A trail like this isn’t really about exercise, though your doctor will be glad you’re on it. It’s about the small, human things that happen on a path that don’t happen anywhere else — the neighbor you finally meet, the kid who learns to ride a two-wheeler somewhere safer than a cul-de-sac, the older couple who found that a morning walk together is the best part of the day.

The highest compliment infrastructure can earn

I’ve watched enough ribbon-cuttings in this county to be a little skeptical of shovels and photo ops. But this one I believe in, because I’ve seen what the finished pieces do. Where the LINK Trail already exists, people use it — not once, for the novelty, but every single day, the way you use a good sidewalk without ever thinking about it. That’s the highest compliment public infrastructure can earn: to become so ordinary you forget it was ever a fight to build.

Somerdale and Hi-Nella are the kind of places you drive through on your way to somewhere else. Starting this month, they’re each getting a little richer in the way that actually counts.Max Cedar

When it connects to the next piece, and the piece after that, those two small boroughs will find themselves part of something 34 miles long. That’s how you build a county worth living in. Not all at once. Four-tenths of a mile at a time.

Based on reporting from ROI-NJ, The Sun Papers, and Camden County.