Almost half of the bike path in the State Forest is in bad shape. I mean, terrible shape. Anyone who bikes on the Vineyard knows someone who’s hit a frost heave there and taken a spill. For years, I’ve wondered why the bad spots have gone untended.
I’d heard rumors. The shared-use path (its proper name) runs through the woods for 13 or 14 miles. In 2019, six miles, mostly in West Tisbury, were resurfaced. A story had it that there were once funds to do the remaining seven or eight miles, most in Edgartown, but the pandemic intervened, and any money went elsewhere. Another version said that resources for ecologically favorable transport went to fund the Island’s electric buses.
Those explanations turn out to be false. I know because this fall I began contacting the relevant agencies. No one wanted to talk. The problem, I came to think, was that everyone agrees on the main point, that the state of the path is an embarrassment.
In time, four administrators from three agencies spoke with me “on background,” that is, without being named or quoted. Now, I have answers, although I’m not free to say where they came from. The details are (to me) fascinating and frustrating — because, as with everything on the Island, they’re complicated. There are funding problems exacerbated by bureaucracy, jurisdictional overlap, and competing priorities.
Also, there’s good news: Conditions on the path are improving slightly, and there’s hope for a comprehensive fix — eventually. Maybe by 2031. Maybe sooner. Not much sooner. But the path is on the agencies’ list for repairs, and it’s hard to even get on the list.
Regarding my own involvement: Time was that on most sunny mornings, summer or winter, I’d wake early and bike from Music Street to the Aquinnah lighthouse and back.
As I got older — I’m 78 — my routes got shorter. Summers, early traffic increased to the point that I wouldn’t set out unless I could finish shortly after seven. Increasingly, I headed to the bike path. Not a bad alternative. The path runs through woods and along fields. It’s beautiful, and often empty enough that you can get a rhythm going.
The access nearest to up-Island is a parking lot off Old County Road. The path there is mostly smooth, and you come to know the few cracks and divots like old friends. The problems start on the run closest to the West Tisbury–Edgartown Road. Heading east, starting before the statue of the heath hen, you hit a series of frost and tree-root heaves, with gaps in the asphalt that can be three or even six inches wide. The section abutting the airport fence is all broken up, so that your bike thumps along for hundreds of feet. The path running north–south beside Barnes Road is not much better. Often, cyclists ride on the road, preferring the risk from car traffic to the discomforts of the path.
Then there’s the bucking bronco section that my grandchildren liked when they were younger and had bikes with low-pressure tires. It’s a mile of woodland path that the kids claimed had 150 “thunks” from frost heaves. I rode it recently to check, and would put the number at 120. At a modest pace, that’s a jolt every three seconds.
This setup always seemed dangerous. I have a friend who hit a crack in the path, fell, and broke his clavicle. As I say, everyone has these stories. I developed my own method for absorbing bumps. You rise on tiptoe and bend your leg at the ankle, knee, and hip to form a spring that cushions your spine.
What the technique failed to protect was my shoulder. Two years ago, I saw an orthopedist for new-onset shoulder pain. He diagnosed rotator cuff tears, developed over years. He guessed that getting jostled on the bike — the jolts communicate up the arm — had inflamed the injuries. Who knows? Swimming or gardening — shoulders get workouts.
I put myself on a low-jolt biking regimen, riding the path on restricted routes. The shoulder pain eased. Coincidence, maybe, but the recovery made me think that the path was not for everyone, and hadn’t been for years. I began trying to make sense of why.
No one knows when the beaten-up part of the shared-use path was last resurfaced. Likely never, and the path was laid in the mid-1990s. The 2019 work was not meant to extend to the rest of the path, perhaps in part because of jurisdictional problems.
Technically, the airport and land near it are not State Forest. They are owned by Dukes County, and the bike path runs on an easement — or is meant to. Parts of it stray from the easement. Any agency instituting repairs would need to get additional permissions from the county or resituate the path. The State Forest retains some oversight. All of the State Forest is critical habitat, and there are additional specific conservation restrictions.
MassWildlife would need to be involved. The use of mechanical equipment in the forest requires permitting. And a 1995 agreement, still in place but never implemented, makes Edgartown responsible for upkeep of two substantial (and poorly maintained) stretches. So tending to the remaining parts of the path was always going to be challenging.
Luckily, the Island has an advocate, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission (MVC). The MVC brought the bike path problems to the state Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), which, the Edgartown agreement notwithstanding, has responsibility for the path’s upkeep. The MVC got federal funds earmarked to do a survey of the path’s needs, to fulfill a first step of the DCR planning process.
It turns out that the 2019 repair work in West Tisbury had been overseen by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) under a type of contract — less formal, less demanding, faster to implement than the usual ones — that no longer exists. If MassDOT were to tend to the remaining section, the type of contract now in play, burdened by state and federal regulations, would take years to plan and cost many millions. On the plus side, MassDOT draws on federal disbursements, a large pot of money. However wasteful, the project might be doable. For that reason (funding), the DCR used the MVC survey to initiate a request to MassDOT for repairs that could conceivably be undertaken in 2030 or 2031.
It would be cheaper, quicker, and less cumbersome for the DCR to contract out the work itself. But it has a limited budget, about $7 million a year, with additional funds from grants, and it does upkeep on many thousands of miles of trails. For instance, beginning in 2019, beavers undermined parts of the Norwottuck Rail Trail in Amherst. The DCR responded with temporary remediation, and began a comprehensive reconstruction plan this year. It’s hard for our 1-2-thunk! problem to compete with trail collapse. And even under less cumbersome constraints, on-Island repairs might cost a couple of million.
Nonetheless, the MVC survey has gotten the shared-use path on the DCR to-do list — not an easy task. Perhaps a solution will come via DCR planning. Meanwhile, the path survey came in under budget. The MVC used the remaining funds to purchase an asphalt-sealing machine and gifted it to the DCR. Weird that the funding had to go that way, but never mind. The DCR had the State Forest put the machine to use, and a number of cracks have been sealed.
Sealing can be good short-term maintenance, to prevent water from reaching the path’s sub-base and causing new or wider gaps in the asphalt. But oddly, to me as a cyclist, the repairs seem not to have done much. The most effective use was on a part of the path that is in good shape, along the airport’s northern fence, starting near Barnes Road. There, the surface cracks were thin and the path flat. On the bucking bronco stretch, bike tires still thump over the heaves. And sealant leaves broad cracks wide open. Whether 2½-inch gaps are safer than 3-inch ones is hard to say. So: Some improvement, and the intentions are good. But spot-filling is no substitute for resurfacing. And most cracks remain untouched.
Having spoken to the administrators, my impression is: The goodwill and expertise are there, and the Vineyard is on the DCR’s radar. People go into this business, trail management, because they love the outdoors and care about public access and recreation.
But I became keenly aware that we don’t treat bike travel the way we treat car travel. Hardtop-road upkeep on the Vineyard is remarkable. This past summer, a small chunk of asphalt collapsed at the edge of State Road where it enters the famously narrow North Tisbury Bridge. My early morning biking takes me there regularly. The road damage was minor for cars, but for cyclists, it was scary. It forced bikes out toward the center of the bridge. If you failed to notice the gouge, you’d be thrown into the bed of the brook below. The road surface was repaired within three days — and probably not with cyclists in mind.
Bike-path upkeep is different, I know. But the contrast between three days and — if we’re lucky — 12 years is remarkable.
The shared-use path is a wonderful Island resource, used for commuting as well as recreation. One response to its deteriorating state is to shrug your shoulders, admit that the path still has its charms, and imagine that other trails in the commonwealth’s inventory are in worse condition. But wouldn’t it be great if the relevant agencies could pull together the interested parties, find funding, and speed up the resurfacing process here? Because the real interested party is everyone who rides on the path, or who might if it were in decent shape.
Peter D. Kramer is a recreational cyclist and longtime seasonal Island resident. He is the author of eight books, including “Listening to Prozac,” now in a 30th-anniversary edition.
