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Natchez Trace Parkway
The Trace's new superintendent, Cameron Sholly, after two months of reviewing the responsibility handed him in August, said he will expand the interpretive role of the parkway's staff, focusing more on the 1,000 identified resources along the route - historic venues, Native American cultural sites and natural features.
He also plans a heightened safety awareness for bicyclists, an appropriate and painful response during a year in which two cyclists were killed in accidents with motor vehicles on the Trace. In one of those deaths, a driver has been indicted on criminal charges, and a trial has been set in December.
Sholly's initiative parallels proposed strengthening of Tupelo city ordinances to improve safety and increase penalties for behavior endangering bicyclists and pedestrians using city streets.
Sholly's heightened emphasis on interpretation poses a fine opportunity to draw more people into the Trace's unique identity as a Native American and frontier-opening track. Its traffic connected various kinds of commerce from French Louisiana to the Upper Ohio valley in the period soon after American independence, reaching past the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
While the Trace is a route for many tourists, it also is a daily commuting corridor for many residents along its full length. Many daily users never experience the historic, environmental and cultural attractions of the highway.
A key in expanding interpretive understanding of the Trace lies in drawing them back for more than a rushed commute. Many of the individual sites could sustain periodic special events drawing substantial numbers of visitors, particularly those with specific historic interests.
Sholly, for example, noted that the Meriwether Lewis site on the Trace about 100 miles south of Nashville has been rehabilitated and improved.
Lewis was the Lewis of Lewis and Clark Expedition fame, and he died, perhaps by suicide or maybe as a murder victim, at a tavern where he had stopped on his way to Washington in 1809, while he was governor of the Louisiana Territory. Lewis, former private secretary to Thomas Jefferson, was a key player in one of the most important decisions and episodes in American history.
Many other important links to how westward movement shaped the nation are on the Trace. We applaud Sholly's emphasis.
There has been the accidents on the Trace involving bike riders. My last trip coming back down the Trace, was an almost scary incident. I was meeting a car, it was heading North when I saw the car pulling into my lane...it was then I saw a man and young woman on roller blades(!!) also going South on the pavement of the Trace. The woman stepped into the grass along the shoulder but the man actually kept on going. He had on a color of orange that blended in with the colors in the trees and surroundings and it was just good when we pulled closer, the other driver and myself, that he was seen.
I understand their need to have places for biking, rollerblading, etc, but on a Parkway, or highway? There are even minimum mph signs on a lot of highways for a car, or they will be stopped. There is a very good possibility that a car going even slow, going the speed limit, when run up on a line of facing cars not always seeing someone smaller, using a method of travel not suitable for highways.
In Des Moines they have bikers lanes winding around inside the town, thus not putting bikers at such a risk. Instead of putting all of these out on a danger zone of highways, why not do the same as other larger cities?
I have two grown children, both bikers, a family in West Des Moines that all bike together, but they use bike lanes...not highways. It is against the law for a 4 wheeler to be on a highway and yet they can go almost, if not as fast as, a car. I'm missing something it seems.