Blazing a PATH

Along Interstate-285 in Atlanta, Georgia, a brown sign alerts motorists ‘Silver Comet Trail Next Exit.’ “Every time I go by that, I think it’s pretty incredible,” muses Ed McBrayer. “There’s that many people using it that we warranted a sign.”

McBrayer gets satisfaction out of a seemingly mundane highway sign because without him, the trail it denotes probably wouldn’t be there. As founder and executive director of the PATH Foundation, he has pioneered a host of trails in and around Atlanta, in the process giving people places to walk, run, bicycle, and incline skate.

A native Georgian from Gainesville, the 60-year-old McBrayer has become a trail engineer in roundabout fashion. After receiving a B.S. in aeronautical engineering from Georgia Tech, his first engineering job came with NASA in Huntsville, Alabama on the Skylab program as a systems engineer working on the stowage list, which involved managing where everything is located on the spacecraft in all phases of flight. Then he moved to Denver, Colorado and did the same thing for Martin Marietta, a NASA subcontractor.

In Denver, McBrayer underwent his first career change. “I started building my own house in my spare time and enjoyed it so much. Somebody came along and offered me a lot more money for the first house I ever built than I thought it was worth, so I sold it and started building another one,” he recalls. “Pretty soon, I was building two friends’ houses, and I realized I enjoyed building houses a lot more than sitting at the desk during the week. So I quit my job and started a construction company to build houses.”

Meanwhile, McBrayer took another step toward his present station in life by becoming the planning commissioner for Englewood, a Denver suburb. The Greenway Foundation, a non-profit organization, was building the South Platte River Trail through Englewood, and they asked city officials if they were interested in participating in the planning of it. “I was a bike rider, so I got interested in it and formed a steering committee, and we helped plan the trail through the city,” he remembers.

But, as McBrayer tells it, “The building business flopped in Denver back in the late 1980s.” Back home in Georgia, “Atlanta was booming, and a lot of my family was still down here.” He closed up shop in Denver and moved to Atlanta, where he continued in the construction trade by buying houses to remodel and building new houses.

Although business was good, McBrayer found something missing. ”When I came out here before the Olympics and tried to ride my bike, there was nowhere to ride.” He found no trails or bike lanes and very few sidewalks. Enormous population growth and urban sprawl had transformed Atlanta.

Then, on a cycling excursion to Stone Mountain one day in 1991, McBrayer and two of his cycling buddies decided to develop a greenway trail in Atlanta in time for use during the 1996 Summer Olympics. They formed the PATH Foundation with the mission of developing a system of interlinking trails in Atlanta. “In the beginning, we patterned ourselves after the Greenway Foundation in Denver,” he recalls. They set up PATH as a non-profit private agency that would help the government build trails, and the City of Atlanta and DeKalb County established partnerships with them.

McBrayer worked at PATH for a year without pay to get it established, he says. “It got to where it was consuming my life. I was originally going to do this as a volunteer thing, kind of a fun little project. But when the Olympics were coming, and I got some of Atlanta’s city fathers involved in it, we all realized if I was going to get anything significant done, there would have to be a staff, and we would have to devote a lot of time to it.” They asked a foundation in town for $100,000 seed money to get started. “Once we got that, the board and I agreed it was time for me to go fulltime.”

In 1995, PATH launched its first fundraising campaign to raise $2.5 million from private sources to match $3.2 million in public funds. This enabled them to complete over 20 miles of trails in time for the Olympics. In assessing the success of his brainchild, McBrayer remarks, “We’ve come maybe four steps forward and two back. We’ve had a lot of success.” PATH now has 3500 members, and the foundation has raised over $20 million dollars from public and private sources.

Like anyone who develops public trails, McBrayer sees firsthand the bureaucratic difficulties they entail. “We spend two years shuffling paperwork from one office to the other and then four months building the trail,” he says. “It’s a lot of work for a small product. Most of what I go through is no different than if you were building a four-lane highway. We have to go through all the same steps.” Much of this involves getting citizen input. “You have to educate everybody. Some people have never seen a PATH trail before when you go into a neighborhood.”

The engineer in McBrayer comes out when he talks about trails. “My best days are when we’re doing what I call trailsmithing, when we’re out in the field solving problems on alignment, deciding where to put little overlooks and benches. When we’re out there building it, there’s concrete being poured and noise from bulldozers. To me, building something is the fun part. I call all the rest of the stuff development foreplay.”

”Obviously, my building skills, everything from permitting to knowing what 3000 psi concrete is, understanding bridge spans, all that helps because we’re building bridges almost every day. There is a lot more engineering that goes into a trail than one might realize. We’re basically building a mini road system,” McBrayer reveals. Indeed, the paths typically consist of 12-foot-wide, five-inch-thick pavement.

Part of the satisfaction McBrayer gets from building trails comes from seeing how people use them. “In the beginning, it was just a place to get away from the traffic and ride, and just the idea of having a safe place to ride a bicycle. But now, it’s a whole quality-of-life issue. It’s really fascinating to go out on a weekend and see all the things happening on the trail and realizing they didn’t happen before we built them. It connects neighborhoods and makes neighborhoods work again. It gives families a place to do things together. You see families out with the kids on roller blades and kids on tricycles, mom and dad walking behind them. It’s incredible.”

About half the mileage of PATH trails comes on old railroad beds, with the remainder on park land, abandoned streets, utility easements, undeveloped land donated by developers, and edges of cemeteries, golf courses, and roadways. They turned an old trolley line into the Stone Mountain Trail, an 18-mile ribbon from Georgia Tech in downtown Atlanta to Stone Mountain Park; over 12 miles of it are complete. The Chastain Park Trail, a three-miler around Chastain Park, ranks as one of PATH's most popular trails.

With the Atlanta/Dekalb County Trail System, PATH has developed a master plan for 124 miles of trails through DeKalb County. The most recent addition to this is the Arabia Mountain Greenway Trail, which connects historic downtown Lithonia to a mall and nature center.

But PATH’s crowning glory came when it established a partnership with the state, three counties, four cities, and several interest groups in 1998 to build the Silver Comet Trail between Atlanta and the Alabama state line on the abandoned Seaboard Coastline railroad. Currently, 49 of the planned 60 miles of the trail are complete.

With such accomplishments and the rewards they bring, McBrayer doesn’t plan to stop building trails anytime soon, at least completely anyway. “I’m hoping to retire one of these days. But even after I do, I hope I can continue to help expand the system here in Atlanta. I feel like I have responsibility to try to finish it to some degree.” He has already done more than his share.

For more information on PATH and its trails, visit www.pathfoundation.org