East Coast Greenway

Washington Post - On the map, it's a long, squiggling line running along the East Coast. It starts in the Maine backcountry and meanders until it hits the Florida Keys. For bicyclists, it represents a 2,930-mile journey on trails, urban streets and genteel country thoroughfares that they hope will become as famous as the Appalachian Trail: the East Coast Greenway. Members of the East Coast Greenway Alliance, the organization that mapped the trail, have been working on the project since 1991. The alliance doesn't construct bike paths; it maps existing ones, a time-consuming process that includes field-testing. It's still in the early stages of putting up signs to guide bicyclists along the way. . . Although the group's dream is to have the entire route go off-road, only 20 percent of the current path is car-free.