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Transportation & Recreation
For decades, urban riverfronts have been transportation centers, serving as ports and levees for river-borne commerce and as transition points between shipping, rail and, more recently, highways. Global shifts in transportation patterns, and increasing reliance on over-the-road trucking, have increasingly rendered urban riverfronts as zones of obsolete transportation uses. Commonly, these abandoned rail and industrial roadways can be converted to bikeways, walking paths, some atop flood control levees, and parkways.
Alternative Transportation
The Mississippi River Trail
MRT is a network of bikeable roads and bike/walking trails that is planned to extend the full length of the Mississippi River, from the headwaters in northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. The project, which is led by state and local groups, incorporates locally-developed bike and walking paths. It then connects these community projects with sections of state and local roads that are suitable for bicycling.
Increasingly, in cities such as Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Davenport, Iowa, the MRT is seeing commuter bike traffic, as people seek relief from high gas prices by biking to work along the Mississippi.
