It's more that there's no coherent policy in a lot of states on what ROW's they do need to preserve. CT is an example of good planning. All of their landbanked ROW's with trails are state-administered linear parks with no leases to municipalities or "Friends of the Trail" organizations sticking their fingers in it and making it a bureaucratic mess. Only outside party they deal with is the East Coast Greenway alliance, for fed funding reasons. Every potential reactivation corridor is ranked on their State Rail Plan by realistic chances they'd want to use it: 1) NYNE Manchester-Willimantic (commuter rail), 2) Air Line Willimantic-Putnam (Amtrak NEC 2030 vision), 3) NYNE Plainfield-state line (Hartford-Providence rail), 4) Air Line Portland-Willimantic (Amtrak NEC 2030 vision non-preferred alternative). That's it...they don't bother listing the Canal Line because that has no envisionable service worth so much as a study over the next 25 years. NH does a similar thing, where abandoned ROW's are offered up "as-is" for snowmobile and recreational use with no warranty and no expectation for state support. And they can withdraw usage at-will without consulting anyone. In fact, I think they only have 1 state-administered paved trail, the Salem-Windham one.
MA is an example of totally incoherent policy. There's no prioritization, and their network has been eaten alive by municipal groups sicking town pols and state legislators to twist the T and EOT to blindly fork over trail leases. There are 5 state agencies that own ROW's--EOT, MBTA, DCR, Mass Water Resources, and the Turnpike Authority--who don't always agree with each other on line usage. DCR once making trouble for itself by getting in a spat with RIDOT over a Woonsocket-Boston commuter rail study on the part of the Franklin Line the unpaved Trunkline Trail runs on. Then nd DCR often gets bludgeoned by the towns to pick up maintenance on the municipally-designed trails the EOT and T give out leases for. Often trails they didn't even want added to their network. It wastes time, money, and leads to a haphazard network of disputed jurisdiction that no parties are truly satisfied with. And it encourages rampant NIMBY games, like encroachment (all it takes is 1 building constructed on an ROW you let a town own and it's blocked forever) or games about who's allowed to use it.
They have also indeed given away lines that have immediate rail uses, like the Falmouth Branch (Cape Cod Central RR, with an expensively renovated station finished just before the local legislator booby-trapped a bill requiring the tracks get ripped out), Chicopee (freight customers lobbying for PV to be allowed to reinstate service), and the Armory Branch (CDOT and Amtrak pushing for immediate restoration as a Springfield Line freight bypass). Plus other cases where the only aim was for the towns to seize it fast and yank the rails before anyone has a chance to think, then screw planning a usable trail (i.e. the "Iron Horse Preservation Society" scam that gets trotted out). Danvers Phase I (unusable trail because of washouts and poor grading work by Iron Horse), Chicopee, the pending disaster in Methuen (NH commuter rail study area), Newburyport (encroaching on the Eastern Route so no restoration to Portsmouth can be full 2-track), and the smoke-and-mirrors hostile takeover a 2-man trail lobby is trying to do in Dover (high-ranked studied commuter rail). Purely coincidentally, all of those except Newburyport playing the Iron Horse Preservation card. Other potential disasters: the Bruce Freeman extension to Framingham, the Milford-Holliston trail, the Saxonville Branch trail, and the Leominster-Fitchburg trail. In each of those cases CSX owns the ROW's and has abandonment filings that take effect pending sale of the lines. They're negotiating straight with the towns, who can't afford it. The F&L and Milford Branch STB filings have been amended with 180 day extensions 8 or 9 times because they can't close the deal, and things got so pissy between CSX and Leominster that CSX jacked the purchase price to a "go @#$% yourself" $50M and the trail group petitioned to disband entirely and revoke the agreement rather than keep talking. Where is the state in all this? The EOT owns all the rest of the F&L the Freeman trail sits on...why won't they scoop up the rest, lock that whole ROW up, and keep Framingham from starting yet another spat with CSX? Why's the Saxonville Branch ownership still not signed and legal when that trail is partially designed?
Hopefully the State Rail Plan being drafted now can rein some of this ill behavior in. The state needs to do what CT was doing and rank the ones it'll need. They need to lock up the ownership of abandoned ROW's and not leave things in a bunch of hotheaded town selectmen's hands. They have to get their stories straight agency-to-agency. They have to state for the record which ones have MPO-rated activation studies so not all 99-year leases are created equal (importantly: the Minuteman agreement is armed to the teeth saying that Arlington and Lexington cannot object if the Red Line has to go there and the state makes all reasonable efforts to relocate the trail). They have to enforce property laws so encroachment isn't such a threat. They have to stop giving these leases to groups so disorganized a DCR bailout is later needed (Methuen, Danvers...i.e. everyone pimping the Iron Horse scam). And they have to stop being blind to NIMBY games. These ROW's don't come back if you brain-fart one away (e.g. the Dover guys spreading rampant disinformation and encouraging trespassing on a still-active freight ROW).
Required reading:
http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress ... rail-scam/.
This blogger can be annoyingly pretentious at times, but usually a thoughtful read. He's right on-point framing the rail-trail debate here. Uses a textbook case of a town falling for the Iron Horse scam (in this case different salvage company, same exact misleading sales pitch) to scuttle a line that had imminent usage potential. His argument takes a dim view of people who want walking paths. I don't agree with him there. I think there's a need not being adequately met. Problem is it's so willy-nilly how to approach that need that it's fracturing the debate on
wheels vs. feet grounds. i.e. Somebody's mode has to "win" and somebody's has to "lose". With open encouragement for whoever wants to pervert the process. The chaos ought to be the dead giveaway that there has to be structure given to the debate, because what matters is optimal use of the ROW. If it's being poorly utilized because somebody had to "win" and somebody had to "lose", everybody loses. And yes, that includes the trail supporters who "won" because some ROW's are really poorly set up for pedestrian connectivity and too difficult to maintain (see the blogger's Providence grade crossing example...see Methuen's lack of connectivity to any other pedestrian concentrations, including streets with sidewalks...see Danvers' washout problems...see Chicopee's industrial middle-of-nowhere and state highway crossings...etc., etc.). Too many bad decisions get made when people can only frame this in terms of transportation conflict.
