Brochure Focus Questions

What types of benefits do trails provide?

• What types of economic benefits are there?
• What types of health benefits are there?
• What types of social benefits are there?
• What types of environmental benefits are there?
• Also include a picture of a nice trail with someone walking on it.

How do the economic aspects of building the trail look?

• What types of funding are available?
• What are some of the things that will add to the cost to the project?
• How much will those things cost?

Is building the trails feasible?

• Are the trails publicly supported?
• Does it seem beneficial to build them, in the long run?
• Include a side by side picture of a widely used trail versus the experimental forest.

Where should the trails be located?

• What main roads should the trails be constructed along?
• Relative to the road, where should the trails be placed? (i.e. Along the side, separated by some grass, or etc.)
• Include visuals of trail possibilities and of the roads.

-Team Post (we all met and agreed to the focus questions)

Brochure Update

A few images used in the Brochure will be the Logo. This logo shows our group name and a green Clemson paw. The green accents show our focus on nature and environmental preservation.

Bike treads are placed around the brochure to show the focus on biking and the outdoors. These treads are simple outlines for the brochure but give a nice frame for images and text.

The front of the brochure shows a beautiful image of the Blue Ridge Mountains. These mountains are an amazing back drop to this trail system. 

-Robert Stafford

Funding

·      Government Grants

·      Local Department of Transportation, SCDOT: Administer the SAFETEA-LU Federal funding. These programs require zero and twenty percent local matching of funds given.

·      Sponsors: Clemson University, The Town of Six Mile, Daniel High School, and Local Businesses

·      Fundraising: Local Businesses

·      State Funding: Safe Routes to School, recreational Trails Program, Highway Safety Improvement Program, Community Development Block Grants

·      Taxes: Some states implement a fraction of the sales tax to help with trail improvement. Other states have a bike tax that is charged per bike to help generate revenue for upkeep of trails.

·      Programs:  American Greenways Program, Bikes Belong Grant, Adopt a Bikeway, Sidewalk or trail Program. 

-Robert Stafford

Route Scouting - Level II

I found the Pickens County GIS system online, so I was able to scout the property on the route I already discussed.

 This is a GIS map of a portion of Hwy 133 from Six Mile to Clemson. Each plot of land is denoted in black borders, and I have highlighted Hwy 133 in red. The small grey dots within the plots are buildings. As you can see, a majority of the plots adjacent to the road (and therefore capable of diverting the bike path from the direct roadside) are very small. This is likely residential property, and the more small residential plots that must be traversed by the path, the more bureaucracy, legal wrangling, and potential expense must be incurred as more and more property owners are dealt with. A more efficient strategy is to find plots of land adjacent to the road with large amounts of road frontage. In the context of this area of Pickens County, these are likely farms. Regardless of what the specific tracts are, since they offer a great deal of road frontage and are all owned by the same owner, they can more easily be negotiated with for the right to let the trail wander onto their property.

White-filled boxes marked by letters show such tracts of land. Sites A, B, and D are all owned by private citizens, and from the building markers, they are composed primarily of open land. The topography of the map suggests this land is relatively flat, too. Each plot is over 50 acres, so with that much open land and only one property owner to deal with, these would be good spots at which the trail could be purposely diverted from the road to create a more scenic bike path. Sites C, E, F, and G are portions of the Clemson experimental forest, and so they are guaranteed to be somewhat scenic, and hopefully the university will be willing to allow some of its land to be used for a bike path.

Yellow-filled boxes marked with numbers show points of interest that the trail could make special efforts to be diverted towards. Site 1 is one of the main entrances to the Issaqueena Lake section of the experimental forest (with access to many rugged trails). Site 2 is Daniel High School. Site 3 is the approximate location of Twelve Mile Recreation Area.

The next and final step of this process is to parse all this information into some sort of map that is user friendly and can be thrown onto our brochure.

-Cailen

Route Scouting

This isn't quite yet the map that will be ready for the brochure, but I have done some intial route scouting for the trail. I am working on narrowing down exact pathways next.

These are the potential routes that I drove today. I was scouting along as I drove for the general terrain, the existing usage of the land around the routes (is it forested, meaning lots of cost to cut a trail, or is it just a bunch of fields that won’t require much teardown cost?), the types of properties along the way (and therefore the likelihood of the property owners to donate some land if the trail is off the road), any important facilities that might be nice to link the trail to, and also the number and potential length of any water crossings. I also tried to notice the traffic in case the bike path has to be built close to the road.

After scouting these routes, I can pretty much say that anything except Route B is far too cumbersome to work with. Both Routes A and C get extremely hilly around their water crossings, to the point that it would discourage casual bikers if left alone or involve great expense to make them more friendly to casual bikers. The route highlighted in orange is kind of a “northern limit” on the relative unfriendliness to casual bikers. Above this line, the road and land is relatively flat, and there is a power line close to the orange line that could potentially serve as a low-cost pathway to go between the upper parts of A and C and the rest of B. However, the land traversed by the orange route is also very hilly, and so crossing over from route to route is not advisable in terms of biker friendliness.

So, the final conclusion is something along Route B is the best option. If we stray too far away from Route B, we will quickly get into very hilly terrain, and even staying directly next to the road involves negotiating a few long, low-graded hills. Additionally, Route B passes very closely to Daniel High School, Twelve Mile Recreation Area, and the main entrance to the Issaqueena Lake area of the experimental forest, so it can serve as an easy route for someone to get to these important places.

Next up, I am going to attempt to see if there is a GIS online map of the area, so I can get an idea of who owns the property adjacent to this route. At the most basic, we can throw a bike lane on Hwy 133 (which is looking like the most cost-effective option), but having an idea of what the property ownership is could give some guidance if we have to deviate from the bike lane.

-Cailen