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dations, including L.A. County, the
National Park Service, the Sierra Club,
The Wilderness Society, the California
Community Foundation and retailer REI.
Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (RTC) has
helped Amigos on several fronts, including
provisions for a park entrance along the
Rio Hondo, funding to help with volunteer
coordination and stewardship, and best-
practice consultation for infrastructure con-
versions and legacy programming.
“We’ve worked with RTC in imple-
menting its Rx for Health initiative, which
is particularly helpful for our disadvantaged
youth,” Robinson says. “In part because of
the lack of green and play spaces, a lot of
very young children are developing diabe-
tes. Rx for Health encourages them to walk,
hike or bike instead of simply going to a
doctor and getting medicated.
“We’re also working to connect our
parks and trails with a really innovative
regional transportation plan—led by
the Southern California Association of
Governments in conjunction with the
Metropolitan Transit Authority—to expand
the transit lines crossing the county,”
Robinson says.
“Along with those mass transit con-
nectivity opportunities, our plan connects
the ocean and the California Coastal Trail
to the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel rivers
and eventually [onward to] the Pacific Crest
Trail, which runs from Canada to Mexico.
We definitely see our work as a microcosm
of a national trail system, connecting us
to [parts of ] California and the rest of the
country.”
Bayshore Bikeway
Speaking of connectivity and the California
Coastal Trail (CCT), the San Diego
Association of Governments (SANDAG)
is slowly but surely implementing its vision
for a 24-mile, Class I bikeway that traces
San Diego Bay, coincident with the CCT.
Efforts to realize the Bayshore Bikeway, as
it’s now called, were spawned in the late
1970s when San Diego had an opportunity
to repurpose the out-of-service Coronado
Belt Line railway, which ran from the famed
Hotel del Coronado around the southern
end of San Diego Bay.
“I’ve been involved since 1990, when
SANDAG took the lead on the Bayshore
Bikeway,” says Stephan Vance, SANDAG’s
senior regional planner. “Led by Greg Cox,
who was mayor of Chula Vista at the time,
we put together a sort of ad hoc working
group that met quarterly in an effort to try
and stitch together a complete trail. Two
decades later, it finally looks like [we’ve got
enough cooperation among the municipali-
ties, state and federal governments] to make
it happen.”
Cox, now San Diego County supervisor,
had been part of the bikeway effort for a
decade when he asked SANDAG to help in
1990. “In the 1980s, each of the five cities
on the San Diego Bay—Imperial Beach,
Chula Vista, National City, Coronado and
San Diego—really started to see the value
of the project in terms of public health and
transportation. We all went to work togeth-
er through SANDAG because it has the
best access to funding sources,” Cox says.
To date, the bikeway has been com-
pleted on large, scenic marine stretches—
through the San Diego National Wildlife
Refuge and along what’s known as the
Silver Strand, a thin strip of peninsula that
shoots north from Imperial Beach to tour-
ist hotspot Coronado. Now, Cox says, the
challenge is to connect bits of bikeway on
it connected the Angeles [National] Forest
and San Gabriel Mountains to the ocean. It
would have been fantastic,” says Robinson.
“A lot of the problems [in Los Angeles ema-
nate from the fact that] we’re segregated.
There’s no mass transit that unites us and
mixes people up, and the car culture keeps
people very separate in the worst way. If
you have major, connected regional parks,
people from all walks of life can move. We
want non-vehicular transportation and con-
nection to local neighborhoods and habitat
restoration—reclaiming areas along the
urban channels and getting people excited
about how much our quality of life will
change if we are able to fully implement this
green infrastructure.”
Though Robinson has been the Emerald
Necklace catalyst, she says the Amigos
movement has been carried forward by
close partnerships with numerous govern-
ment agencies, advocacy groups and foun-
Amigos De Los Rios
Rio Vista Park, part of Los
Angeles County’s Emerald
Necklace of parks and
greenways.