The City of Albuquerque through its Metropolitan Redevelopment Agency, seeks your comments on the Rail Trail (cooler name pending, I guess) proposed to run from the northern edge of the Railyards to Lomas generally along the train tracks and 1st Avenue.

As with all such proposals these days, the plentiful sections of the Trail’s draft Framework Plan (again, cooler name probably pending) are full of artist’s renderings to give respondents an idea of how great it’s gonna look when this thing is finished.

Your humble blogger is himself just starting to rummage through the draft Plan before making comments and can only report so far that, as an English teacher, I do count off for bad spelling. Much more important, this trail idea would seem to have great potential, particularly from a connectivity standpoint, IF (and this is a very large IF) the initial proposed scope is magnified to include something other than a person getting to Lomas and 1st Avenue where the Trail suddenly stops…

And you’re at the corner of Lomas and 1st.

The City put this proposal under Metropolitan Redevelopment and it very much shows. The proposal focuses much on revitalizing downtown and not so much on connectivity/transport, as would have been the case if this was a DMD gig. That’s okay, there are things besides transportation, and the main idea here is that economic development will grow directly along the Trail, because it has art and plants and is such a destination place to be.

The City is seeking your thoughts on that and all other aspects of the proposal by January 31, 2022. At present, the link for comments is simply an email to somebody at the City. Given how spiffy all the artist renderings look through the proposal, a better match for comments might be something a tad more user-friendly and colorful than the blank white of an email waiting to be written.

All things considered, yet well before my own rummaging through the Plan is over, I find myself rooting for this Trail, despite a healthy triple dose of skepticism. Maybe I’ll see you out there one of these days, helmet-free on a bike. Watch out for that roadrunner.