One of the most exciting perks of urban trails is that pretty much anybody can create one! As Bob Siegel of the San Francisco Crosstown Trail Coalition once said (we're paraphrasing here) urban trails are buried under the sidewalk and dirt paths that already in a city. These trail fragments are basically waiting to be connected, charted, and daylit. While some urban trails—especially bike trails—do require significant physical construction and paving, trails like the Walking City Trail can be built without picking up a single shovel or pickmatic. This DIY "trail building" process principally involves scouting, mapping, and activating a hiking route. And on this page, you'll find our tips for creating an urban trail with this model, wherever you live.
STEP #1 - IDENTIFY THE TRAIL THEME: Every hiking trail tells a story or offers an idea, and urban trails are no exception. Do you want to create a way for people to hike from one end of a city to another? Do you want to take them along a route that's jammed with historic places and relics? Or curious landscape features such as waterways or hidden staircases? The first step of creating an urban trail is deciding what the trail is going to be about. This will have a formative impact on every step that follows, but especially one of the most lengthy and labor-intensive steps of trail-building: figuring out where the trail is going to be built.
STEP #2 - FIND THE TRAIL ROUTE: When it comes to creating the route of an urban trail, there are a lot of questions to be asked, including the length of the trail, the places it will visit, and the resources it will include (public transportation, public toilets, etc.) Building the Walking City Trail began with several hours spent on Google Maps, identifying parks, woods, and other green spaces in Boston through which the trail could run. This process really underscored the importance of deciding the distance of the trail fairly early. There's really no correct answer to how long or short an urban trail should be, but trails of a longer length might appear intimidating to some hikers, and that's why breaking a trail into sections is a method adopted by many urban trail builders. If you decide to take this approach to a trail in your city, ensuring that each trail section begins and ends near public transportation will make the trail a lot more accessible to hikers.
Once you've got a theoretical urban trail route sketched out, after studying maps of your local landscape, the real fun begins. You'll have to venture into the field and try walking that trail route. And you'll want to be ready to adjust that route, based on what you find in the green spaces and neighborhoods through which your trail runs. You're inevitably going to stumble across cool landscape features, vistas, or other sights that don't show up on maps, and you should feel free to tweak the trail route so that it visits any of these things. You can use a GPS app such as AllTrails or Gaia GPS to track your route (especially in scenarios where you're hiking in a location where the trails and walking routes don't show up on digital maps) or you can take notes on paper. Take pictures too, for your own reference and for the public-facing trail materials that you'll eventually want to create.
To create a working, accessible map of your finalized trail route, you'll want to turn to a platform that allows you to sketch custom maps. For the Walking City Trails, we used AllTrails, which allows you to make custom-drawn maps that can be shared with the public via direct link. (This is not the same as creating an official AllTrails profile for a trail that people can discover by searching for it, which we'll get to later.) The benefit of using AllTrails to create your first trail map is that AllTrails maps show far more hiking paths in cities than Google Maps does. You can also use Google Maps to create a custom-drawn trail map, but you'll want to have GPS files of your scouting hikes on hand in order to trace the lines of trail sections that don't show up on Google Maps, and this means that a Google Map of your trail is going to be slightly less accurate than an AllTrails map, when it comes to the GPS factor. But the popularity and accessibility of Google Maps is reason enough to create a map with this platform anyway. For the Walking City Trail, we created free trail maps on AllTrails *and* Google Maps, to give hikers a choice of maps.
Finally, if your urban trail is going to be broken into sections, then you'll want to create a map for each of those sections, as well as a map of the full trail. These are the maps that you will eventually be sharing with the public, once the next step kicks off.
Once you've got a theoretical urban trail route sketched out, after studying maps of your local landscape, the real fun begins. You'll have to venture into the field and try walking that trail route. And you'll want to be ready to adjust that route, based on what you find in the green spaces and neighborhoods through which your trail runs. You're inevitably going to stumble across cool landscape features, vistas, or other sights that don't show up on maps, and you should feel free to tweak the trail route so that it visits any of these things. You can use a GPS app such as AllTrails or Gaia GPS to track your route (especially in scenarios where you're hiking in a location where the trails and walking routes don't show up on digital maps) or you can take notes on paper. Take pictures too, for your own reference and for the public-facing trail materials that you'll eventually want to create.
To create a working, accessible map of your finalized trail route, you'll want to turn to a platform that allows you to sketch custom maps. For the Walking City Trails, we used AllTrails, which allows you to make custom-drawn maps that can be shared with the public via direct link. (This is not the same as creating an official AllTrails profile for a trail that people can discover by searching for it, which we'll get to later.) The benefit of using AllTrails to create your first trail map is that AllTrails maps show far more hiking paths in cities than Google Maps does. You can also use Google Maps to create a custom-drawn trail map, but you'll want to have GPS files of your scouting hikes on hand in order to trace the lines of trail sections that don't show up on Google Maps, and this means that a Google Map of your trail is going to be slightly less accurate than an AllTrails map, when it comes to the GPS factor. But the popularity and accessibility of Google Maps is reason enough to create a map with this platform anyway. For the Walking City Trail, we created free trail maps on AllTrails *and* Google Maps, to give hikers a choice of maps.
Finally, if your urban trail is going to be broken into sections, then you'll want to create a map for each of those sections, as well as a map of the full trail. These are the maps that you will eventually be sharing with the public, once the next step kicks off.