Rails for trails

[zahc]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/03/10/supreme-court-railroad-land-dispute/6252835/

My dad's been fighting rails-for-trails for years in Ohio. In a nutshell, the government decides that it owns all ancient railroad beds, because. Even though there is nothing on your deed or survey indicating and easment, and no records at the local courthouse establishing a lease or anything, much less the transfer of said nonexistent lease to the government, there was a railroad there at one time, apparently, and now that the rails were ripped up 50 years ago and it's all grown over and the rail company dissolved decades ago...the government owns "it", where "it" is an amount of your land equal to what the government says it is entitled to, which it will use for feel-good election-gathering trail program that is great for everyone, oh sorry about your farm road/soybean field/rifle range you built; yuppies from Columbus must have hundreds of miles of paved trails you know, "free" (meaning taxpayer funded) of course. Don't be a downer man.

Read the link for Sotomayer's dissent, which an argument in the classic form of "want take take want"

[KD5NRH]

Part of the point of rails-to-trails is that the land is already cleared, graded and routed to avoid steep climbs, with bridges, tunnels and road crossings already in place...when using recently abandoned ROWs, as intended.  Using old, overgrown and/or built-over, forgotten rail ROW defeats the primary design and implementation purpose.

[zahc]

It doesn't matter how amenable-to-trails a piece of land is. The government should not walk in, notice that my front yard would be a great site for a football pitch, and use that as justification for building a public football pitch in my front yard.

[KD5NRH]

It doesn't matter how amenable-to-trails a piece of land is. The government should not walk in, notice that my front yard would be a great site for a football pitch, and use that as justification for building a public football pitch in my front yard.

Presumably, a rail ROW abandoned in the last decade or so won't be in anyone's front yard, and if it's anywhere near their home, a hike-and-bike trail is a much less disruptive use than having a mile of freight barreling through at 3AM.  Any other disruption (cutting through pastureland, etc.) would also be preexisting and already mitigated in whatever way it was done while the rail was in its original use.

[Ron]

Who owned the land before .gov decided to make it into a rail trail?

If it defaulted to the adjacent land owners then pay them for the loss of property.

I ride many of the rail trails here in Chicagoland. This story will take some of the pleasure out of that recreation   

[charby]

Rails to trails has been really big in Iowa. Many of the rails to trails have been converted from rail roads that were abandoned when a larger railroad bought up the smaller railroads. These are easy conversions since the rail road usually deeds the land to the state. On places where the rail line reverted to the surrounding land owner the state/county/city has bought a permanent easement from the land owner. There a few places where the landowner did not want to grant an easement so the trail ends at the property line and one must use the road for biking until reaching the next section of the trail.

So far no eminent domain has been expressed, but it is amazing that after a few years the reluctant landowners start to agree to easements. I think it is that they get tired of the slow moving bikes on the roads.

Rails to trails has been a boom to a lot of little towns where restaurants/bars and campgrounds have sprung for the folks using the trails.

[SteveS]

Presumably, a rail ROW abandoned in the last decade or so won't be in anyone's front yard, and if it's anywhere near their home, a hike-and-bike trail is a much less disruptive use than having a mile of freight barreling through at 3AM. 

Most of the trails I familiar with would tend to support this, but then I read this from the article:

Justice Stephen Breyer, who has had three bicycling accidents since 1993 — the last of which in April resulted in a shoulder replacement — envisioned a future in which landowners could be besieged by bikers.

"I certainly think bicycle paths are a good idea," he said, but "for all I know, there is some right-of-way that goes through people's houses, you know, and all of a sudden they are going to be living in their house, and suddenly a bicycle will run through it."

Umm, did any of his bike accidents involve head injuries?

[Bigjake]

"I certainly think bicycle paths are a good idea," he said, but "for all I know, there is some right-of-way that goes through people's houses, you know, and all of a sudden they are going to be living in their house, and suddenly a bicycle will run through it."

And I envision a world where I can run the smug, spandex clad aholes over,  when they blow through traffic lights. With no legal penalty.  

[mtnbkr]

and with that, we're done.

Chris