34 Miles, One Neighborhood: What the LINK Trail Means for Your Town

AUDUBON — There’s a stretch of old rail corridor running between Merchant Street here in Audubon and Station Avenue over in Haddon Heights, and if you drove past it a year ago you probably didn’t think twice. Overgrown, forgotten, the kind of in-between land that towns tend to turn their backs on. Walk it this fall and you’ll be standing on the first finished mile of something that’s going to change how this whole county gets around.

It’s called the Camden County LINK Trail, and the shovels went in the ground back in March. When it’s done, it will be a 34-mile, off-road, multiuse path — walking, biking, running, strolling with the dog — stretching all the way from the base of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Camden down to the Gloucester County line in lower Winslow Township. County officials describe it as the spine of a much bigger trail network, and that’s the right word for it. A spine. Something everything else connects to.

The Tuesday version

I want to explain what that actually means for the people reading this, because “34-mile regional greenway” is the kind of phrase that sounds important and tells you almost nothing about your Tuesday.

Here’s the Tuesday version. The trail is being designed to link municipal and county parks, thread through downtown business districts, and pass through the urban, suburban, and rural parts of Camden County that right now don’t have a safe way to reach each other on foot or on a bike. If you’ve ever wanted to ride from your neighborhood to the next town over for a coffee or a ballgame without taking your life into your hands on a county road, this is the project built to give you that. It connects the places you already go, using land the community already owns.

One corridor at a time

The piece under construction now is the Audubon-to-Haddon Heights segment, running more than a mile along the Atlantic Avenue rail corridor. County officials put its cost at roughly $3.1 million, and Commissioner Jeff Nash credited Congressman Donald Norcross with securing a federal grant that covers the full tab for this stretch. Work officially began in early March, and the county expects this first segment to be finished by the end of the year. That’s not a someday promise. That’s this December.

The groundbreaking back in the spring drew the people you’d expect at a moment like this — Nash, Norcross, Assemblyman Bill Moen, Audubon Mayor Robert Jakubowski, Haddon Heights Mayor Zachery Houck, and Justin Dennis from the Circuit Trail Coalition, the regional group that’s been pushing to connect South Jersey’s patchwork of trails into something whole. The full 34-mile vision carries a price tag north of $100 million and will take years to complete, segment by segment, town by town. There’s real federal money already committed and, as with any project this size, some funding still working its way through the process.

That’s not just infrastructure. That’s a neighborhood deciding it’s bigger than its borders.Max Cedar

The quiet ambition of it

But that’s the nature of a thing like this. It doesn’t arrive all at once. It arrives one corridor at a time, one ribbon-cutting at a time, until one day you realize you can get farther than you ever could before without ever touching a highway.

What I keep coming back to is the quiet ambition of it. Somebody looked at 34 miles of disconnected parks, forgotten rail beds, and downtowns that turn their backs on each other, and decided they ought to be stitched together. That the kid in one town and the grandmother in the next ought to share a path.

Come December, the first mile will be under your feet. Go walk it. It’s the start of something.

Based on reporting from The Sun, Patch, ROI-NJ, The Retrospect, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Neighborhood Gazette covers South Jersey at neighborhoodgazette.town.