Cape-to-Connecticut bike ride shows progress, bumps on route Despite rains, New England still dry in certain parts
Bristol, R.I. — After a white-knuckle trip over a bridge from Portsmouth into Bristol, which involved lifting our bicycles over concrete barriers and construction equipment, the police officer who pulled us over told us something we had already figured out.
“You shouldn’t try to cross that bridge on a bicycle,” he told my friend and me. “It’s dangerous.”
What he could not tell me was a better way, other than taking a bus, to get to the East Bay Bike Path, a safe, multiuse paved trail that runs along Narragansett Bay from Bristol to Providence.
It was the second day of a four-day ride to explore by bicycle the southern New England portion of the East Coast Greenway, a planned 3,000-mile route of connected trails from Maine to Florida. More than a quarter-century into the project, long swaths are now on protected, safe trails. Others are not.
There are 386 miles of Greenway planned in southern New England, and that section is about 41 percent complete, according to Lisa Watts, a spokeswoman for the East Coast Greenway Alliance. The rest is on everything from quiet back roads to very busy four-lane thoroughfares.
“We always caution long-distance cyclists that this is a route in development,” Watts said.
I rode with Lori Riley, of the Hartford Courant, 212 miles from Cape Cod to eastern Connecticut. More than 96 miles of it was on rail trails and other bike paths featuring views of the water, old railroad bridges, ice cream shops, joggers and bicyclists. Our one flat tire came two miles from a bike shop that was adjacent to the path in Dennis, Mass.
Close calls
In between the trails, the riding was often on heavily trafficked roads, such as the Old Kings Highway on Cape Cod, with no shoulder. That meant cars screaming by inches from us, honking, with people yelling, “Get off the road,” ‘’This isn’t the Tour de France” and worse.
Leaving the Cape meant traveling the pedestrian walkway on the Bourne Bridge over the Cape Cod Canal, and then trying to negotiate Capebound Friday traffic on a heavily traveled rotary.
Then came the searching. We used the mapping tool on the East Coast Greenway website to stay on course, but that’s hard to do while riding. Signs pointing the way were few and usually small and hard to spot.
We passed salt marshes and windmills as we explored new bike paths on what is to become the 50-mile South Coast Bikeway system in Massachusetts.
But the GPS then took us through the heart of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Confronted with a highway onramp at the end of a bridge, we were forced to walk the saddlebag-laden bikes down a long flight of stairs. That was followed by a teeth-jarring trip over downtown cobblestones and more traffic past a mall, before we figured out some back roads into Rhode Island.
While some renovated bridges have bike lanes, on the Mount Hope bridge from Portsmouth we had to lift our bikes as we squeezed past equipment and construction barriers. The police officer, who did not ticket us, said someone called because they thought we were getting ready to jump.
Once on the East Bay path, the stress disappeared with sunset views of Narragansett Bay.
The next morning, a short ride downtown from where the East Bay path ends in Providence, we found the 19-mile Washington Secondary path, which runs through Cranston, Warwick and Coventry and ends a few miles short of the Connecticut border.
Our fourth day took us home in Connecticut, mostly along the Air Line Trail from Pomfret, an unpaved stone-dust path that runs past East Hampton.
It costs an average of $1 million per mile to build the Greenway and can take up to 20 years to complete a segment, but officials say it is worth the investment. A recent study by the planning and design firm Alta in North Carolina showed the East Coast Greenway generates over $90 million in total benefits annually in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle.
Finishing touches
In Connecticut, where 48 percent of the Greenway is done, several projects have just been completed or are in the final stages, including key segments in Cheshire on the Farmington Canal trail and in Bolton, where two bridges connecting the Hop River to the Charter Oak trail are scheduled to open in September.
Connecticut spends about
Concord, N.H. — Despite this week’s stormy weather, dry conditions are expanding in parts of New England and New York due to warmer-than-average temperatures.
Large parts of the area are abnormally dry or enduring moderate drought conditions, according to data released Thursday from the National Drought Monitor. Moderate drought also reached most of Vermont and New Hampshire, southern Maine and near Buffalo and Rochester in New York.
In New Hampshire, the state Department of Environmental Services says that nearly 50 communities have some water restrictions with nearly half of them being mandatory. With the entire state either in moderate drought or abnormally dry, the rules restrict outdoor water use.
“It could definitely get worse before it gets better,” said Mary Stampone, the state climatologist. “The near-term forecast is for wet weather which would be great. But we still have quite a bit of summer to go. As temperatures get warmer, if you don’t get the precipitation you need, the drought can intensify.”
But Stampone said the drought conditions are nothing like they were in 2016. Then, bone-dry conditions caused private wells to go dry, fire risks were increased and farmers were forced to abandon crops or spend much more on irrigation.
Instead, the drier conditions have everyone from municipal leaders to farmers on alert.
At a drought management meeting in Concord on Thursday, officials talked about levels at some of the larger lakes being below normal for this time of year. There were also reports of dry wells — though most municipal water systems said they were in good shape.