City of Bowie Pin Oak Trail
Bowie, MD
The City of Bowie, Maryland is blessed with many small segments of bicycle and pedestrian facilities, but lacks an identifiable network with a strong community image. The City of Bowie’s 2016 Sustainability Plan targeted two specific goals for improving the City’s walkability and expanding existing trails for biking, hiking and family walks into a safe interconnected network.
The City funded an update to the Trails Master Plan to address these goals and to set new priorities for future capital improvement projects to help achieve the goals. Updating the City Trails Master Plan presented an opportunity to address current issues and the needs of the trail system’s users.
The Trails Plan Update was conducted over an eight-month process that included a community survey and two trails planning workshops that formed the basis for the draft plan. The resulting document included the network goals and priorities, gap analysis, alternatives evaluation, trail network recommendations and trail design recommendations, as well as guidance on implementation and funding.
The purpose of the Bowie Byway Trail: Pin Oak Parkway to Mt. Oak Drive Feasibility Study/Plan was to investigate two alternative routes for the Bowie Byway (the primary, planned, north-south pedestrian and bicycle spine within the City of Bowie) between Pin Oak Parkway and Mount Oak Road.
The Bowie Trails Master Plan proposes a paved, shared use path that would begin at the terminus of Pin Oak Parkway and would extend through the neighborhood open space (city-owned property) and connect to Mount Oak Park (M-NCPPC parkland) where it then aligns with the M-NCPPC planned Path 1. Then, new side path or shared use path would need to be constructed along Mount Oak Road (County) where it would connect to the existing side path along Nottinghill Dr. and an existing side path on the north side of Mount Oak Dr. (east of Nottinghill).