Regional Trail Access- King County

Performance Measures

Related Information

Regional Trail Access

Residents' proximity to regional trails

About this measure: Regional trails in King County are important public amenities providing active recreation opportunities and regional mobility. The Regional Trails System is 300 miles of paved and unpaved greenways. The King County Parks Division has developed and/or maintains the majority of these facilities. For 2010, four measures were tracked to report on progress toward further improving the King County Regional Trail System:

access and proximity to population
closing existing gaps in the network
redevelopment/upgrading of older existing trails, and
ensuring safe trail bridges.

2010 Results: In 2010, consistent with the previous years, 68 percent of county residents live within 1.5 miles of the Regional Trail System, just shy of the target of 70 percent.

An important gap in the Regional Trails System was addressed in 2010. This was the completion of a 1.2-mile-long segment of the Issaquah-Preston Trail east of High Point in the Mountains to Sound Greenway by WSDOT/King County.

Permitting continued for the redevelopment of the Burke-Gilman Trail through Lake Forest Park and for segments of the East Lake Sammamish Trail in Redmond and Issaquah.

To maintain the safety of the County's Regional Trail System, several regional trails bridge/trestle projects were in design and permitting in 2010.

Strategies moving forward in 2011: We continue to improve the Regional Trail System by addressing system distribution, gaps, redevelopment, and bridge resiliency. Redevelopment/upgrading trail segments enhances the network by adding capacity and improving safety.

Two important RTS redevelopment/upgrading projects will be initiated in 2011 along with several important smaller projects. A 2.0-mile-long segment of the Burke-Gilman Trail through Lake Forest Park will be redeveloped to meet current RTS standards and improve safety. This will include trail widening, new design, pavement, and related structures such as retaining walls and street crossings. In addition, a 1.2-mile-long segment of the paved Master Planned East Lake Sammamish Trail will be constructed in Redmond. This northernmost segment of the ELST will also include a trailside parking facility and other user amenities. Other important redevelopment projects include redevelopment of a 0.25-mile-long segment of the Sammamish River Trail and two short segments of the Burke-Gilman Trail in Bothell.

Design and permitting activities will continue on other King County regional trail trails to fill gaps in the trails network including the Soos Creek Trail, Lake-to-Sound Trail segments, and Issaquah segment of the Master Planned East Lake Sammamish Trail.

Bridge work underway in 2011 includes the repair of the Snoqualmie Valley Trail-Tolt River Bridge, a significant bridge/trestle project. Design and permitting for a repair of the Griffin Creek Bridge will also be undertaken with expected construction in 2012.

Influencing Factors: Regional trail facilities are similar to roadways - lengthy paved or compacted gravel thoroughfares running in linear open space corridors. Like roads, their development process includes planning, design, permitting, and construction. This process can take years and since many trails are located within or near sensitive habitats where development requires more unique structures, additional permits, and extensive environmental mitigation.

Often the missing links in the system require expensive elements such as bridges over roads or waterways, or navigation around sensitive areas such as wetlands. Additionally, in urban areas, existing build-out presents substantial challenges to creating new trail corridors do to the lack of readily available land.

Map showing proximity of residents to the regional trail network

Proximity of residents to the regional trail network
2006 Findings
Click to download the PDF version.

Technical Notes

For definitions and more detail.

Technical notes for Regional Trail Access

Three important changes are being made to the Regional Trails System performance measures in the transition from '08 to '09. Most importantly, additional measures are being added to allow for a more accurate indication of overall performance.

Additionally, the existing measure of residents' access and proximity to regional trails is being tightened from 1.5 miles to 1.0 mile. Finally, all known regional trails were analyzed this year including some trail segments that were not considered previously because there were gaps in the system. The result was the inclusion of a larger set of trails in urban areas that did not get counted earlier.

As a result of these changes, the performance measures will change for 2009, while the previous measures for 2008 are considered more complete than in previous years. The 2007 measure for regional trails proximity was 69% of residents living within 1.5 miles of a regional trail. The 2008 target was set at 70%.

Using the more complete set of trails in urban areas provides a much higher result, however. Approximately 81.6% of residents are found to live within 1.5 miles of a regional trail under these circumstances. While the performance target was easily exceeded, it was recognized that this was more a result of the manner in which trails were analyzed rather than growth of the RTS.

In reality, the proximity measure was found to change in small increments year to year due to the nature of linear corridors and the difficulties and limitations of developing these facilities in urban areas. While system expansion continues, the new 2008-2009 performance measures provide a more detailed look at progress overall.

When proximity buffer is tightened to 1.0 mile and the more complete 2009 set of trails is used, 61.8% of residents live within 1 mile of a regional trail segment.

Additional Notes:

The new method for calculating the one mile distance modifies the area covered by removing areas across intervening water bodies, unless that area can be reached from the trail in less than one mile by using a nearby bridge.
The Regional Trails set is those trails shown as Primary and Secondary Regional Trails on the 2008 "Regional Trails in King County" map, with the addition of the Westside and South 156th St trails in SeaTac, which were not shown on that map.
No On-Street Connectors for Regional Trails were used in the calculation, but it would have made no difference in the final result.
Population data source is Census 2000 block data. Total County Population (Census 2000) is 1737034 persons.
907861 persons (52.265 percent) are in blocks completely within the modified 1 mile distance.
263431 persons (15.166 percent) are in blocks partially within the modified 1 mile distance
143473 persons (8.259 percent) in these partial blocks were considered to be inside the distance. This number was calculated using the percentage of the area for each split block that fell within the distance to assign the percentage of persons within each block considered to be within the distance.

We welcome your feedback and suggestions to improve this site, such as:

Other reliable environmental data sources for King County
Adjustments to the weightings for indicators and performance measures
Mistakes to fix

Share your thoughts by sending an e-mail to Richard Gelb, DNRP Performance Measurement Lead, at richard.gelb@kingcounty.gov so your input can be considered for subsequent updates.