It’s been called a ‘never-say-die’ project: a proposal for a pedestrian connection across the divided Trans Canada Highway where it bisects the Trans Canada Trail at the edge of the Sackville Waterfowl Park. The disconnect in the trail and the possible fix for it will be the topic of conversation in Sackville next week, at a meeting featuring trails coordinator for Plan 360, Marc Léger, and a group of citizens working on advancing the pedway project.

On Tuesday, Dec. 6, from 7-9 p.m., Léger is inviting all possible stakeholders, including local business owners and current or would-be trail users, to the Sackville Visitor Information Centre to share and discuss ideas.

Léger works in connecting communities via greenway trails, by providing support to community groups and consulting with municipalities. He’s currently working on a 40 km trail connecting Moncton to Parlee Beach, which itself is part of the much larger Shoreline Trail, running from Alma to Shediac.

Léger says he sees lots of potential in the 66-km segment of the Transcanada Trail between Sackville and Cape Tormentine.

“It goes through some really beautiful countryside,” says Léger, citing the Tintamarre National Wildlife Area. “It connects to several communities. It’s the perfect distance for cycle tourism. That 66 kilometers is a really nice sweet spot in terms of what the average cyclist might do in a day, both novice and more advanced cyclists. So it’s a really nice in that regard, it connects a lot of attractions or, or attractions that could be enhanced.”

But there are issues, and the connection through Sackville is one of them.

“The problem is that you’re cut off from that trail with a four-lane highway,” says Léger. While some walkers and riders brave the crossing like ATV drivers, crossing one direction of traffic at a time, the crossing is discouraged in signage. Instead people walking or on bikes are directed to the Mallard Drive entrance to the Waterfowl Park, and then up on to Main Street to cross the highway, before heading back down to the trail near Tantramar Regional High School. The effect is discouraging for people to actually use the trail to connect to Sackville.

Which is why for years groups of residents in Sackville have been making a case for a pedestrian bridge or pedway over the highway. Last December, the most recent incarnation of the group appeared at Sackville town council to update them on progress, and announce a $1 million anonymous donation had been pledged to the project.

Léger calls the project ambitious, but he also believes it could be transformative.

“It would be a game changer for that trail and what that trail could mean for the community,” says Léger. “How it will work, how people will use it, how you can create experiences and business opportunities along that corridor.”

Léger says it is cheaper to include active transportation crossings in the plans for divided highways, and in fact his current Parlee Beach trail is making use of under highway connections included in the route 15 highway when it was built. Adding the connections after the fact is more expensive, but even then, Léger doesn’t balk at the cost.

“It’s somewhere in the vicinity of $4 million to make that a reality,” says Léger. “It sounds like a lot of money. But if we look at infrastructure projects, at large, we find very quickly that $4 million is not an insurmountable amount of money for most infrastructure projects. If we were building something minor for vehicles, I guarantee just about any project starts at $4 million.”

Léger credits Sackville residents working on the project for “thinking big”.

“What’s such a bad thing about spending that amount of money to make your community better?” he asks. “To make a safer link to a school, to make a safer link and a more pleasurable link to Silver Lake? What a wonderful asset in your community, that’s just a stone’s throw away from downtown. But like I said, psychologically, it seems much further because you’ve got to get around that highway.”

The trails coordinator not only thinks the spending is justified, but that the timing might be right to make it happen. Projects like the pedway, and greenway trails in general, are getting more recognition as worthy public investments, says Léger. There’s the uptick in outdoor recreation and tourism which was already trending before the pandemic supercharged it, and there’s the success of projects like the Véloroute on the Acadian Peninsula, which Léger says helped some tourism operators in the area not only survive the pandemic, but thrive during it.

While trails have long been acknowledged for health benefits, the tourism potential is only starting to be recognized in New Brunswick. “When money is made off a trail, then communities realize its value,” says Léger.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Léger says he wants to engage people in a vision for what the trail could be, and use that to create a plan going forward. “Quite honestly, it’s a very selfish pursuit,” says Léger. “I’m trying to crowdsource who we have for support, who wants to get involved more.”

Léger is palpably enthusiastic about the potential for trails in the region.

“I know Tantramar well,” says Léger. “I think there is massive potential as a trail hub,” pointing to connections from Dorchester to Sackville which he says could be “dramatically improved.” He also says there’s potential in dike trails across the isthmus, especially with major infrastructure investments coming to protect it in the coming years.

Outside his day job with Plan 360, Léger is also volunteer with the Fundy Hiking Trails Association, which manages 100 kilometers of wilderness trail including the Dobson and Fundy Footpath. He points out the organization is self-sustaining through guidebook sales and the contributions of hundreds of volunteers. He says the biggest weakness he sees is what the first question out of the gate is, ‘how are we going to pay for this?’

“If that’s the question we ask ourselves before we start, don’t even bother starting,” says Léger. “The first question is, what do we want to do? What do we want to achieve? What’s our goal? Start putting in the work, start putting together the plan. No one’s ever going to give you a dime to build a trail, if you don’t know what it is you want to do, and you don’t know where it’s gonna go, and you don’t have a plan.”

Tantramar residents are invited to join Léger and the pedway planning group for a meeting on Tuesday, Dec. 6 at 7 p.m. at the Visitor Information Centre on Mallard Drive.

Listen to the CHMA story below: