The Great Springs Trail

Defining the value of what a visionary trail connects and protects

Alta
Alta
5 min readNov 15, 2021

By: Jason Reyes and David Wasserman, Alta

Understanding the ripple effects of investments in mobility in our communities is increasingly complex when their impacts on our quality of life are so varied. The paths and trails that wind through our communities, for example, do more than get us from A to B, they are important connections to nature, can enhance tourism and recreational opportunities, and often serve as ecological buffer zones and vital green infrastructure in our communities.

Communicating their value is a multidisciplinary challenge because their ripple effects spread across our environment, society, and economy. Rising to that challenge is an important aspect of how we think about the role of our trails in our communities and transportation at large.

For the Great Springs Trail, a long-envisioned Texas-sized greenway corridor stretching from San Antonio to the Austin capitol, Alta is seeking to do exactly that.

The 100-mile planned greenway connects to the four Great Springs of Central Texas: Barton Springs, San Marcos Springs, Comal Springs, and San Antonio Springs. At various destination points along the corridor, locals and visitors alike can catch pollinators buzzing about native flora, observe bats funnel out from their roost beneath a bridge at dusk, or spot tourists and recreators enjoying a dip in a swimming hole. This stunning and historic swath of central Texas is posited to be recorded in one of the earliest maps of the state that features the four springs depicted in the petroglyph rock art of the early people of the Lower Pecos. Currently, the area encompassing the corridor makes up one of the fastest growing regions in the U.S., threatening to exacerbate critical water, land, wildlife, and public health challenges facing Central Texas.

The rapid infill along the corridor has been an impetus to usher forward the development of the trail plan, which seeks to unify a national park-scale network of over 42 existing trails and greenways plans. Many partnerships are already in place as the endeavor to make the vision of the Great Springs Trail a built reality has been some 25 years in the making.

Alta’s project manager for this plan, Jason Reyes, volunteered for Envision Central Texas in the early 2000s, which was an initiative focused on many of these same issues being discussed in the region today. Later, Reyes served as a trail planning consultant to the Hill Country Conservancy to help develop the master plan for the Violet Crown Trail, which is now one of the longest sections of existing trail along the proposed Great Springs Project (GSP) corridor.

USGS Land Cover Classification data was used to extrapolate a projected value of annual ecosystem services benefits and protected carbon fluxes and stores.

In June 2021, Alta proudly published the Economic Benefits Report for The Great Springs Trail to quantify the financial return from the 100+-mile trail network and 50,000 conserved acres of land in the GSP corridor. The report includes economic, health, environmental, transportation cost savings, as well as climate change data and carbon sequestration estimates. The report will serve to aid project partners who may leverage findings to support ground up efforts to implement the trail network. The Alta team used a multifaceted, analytics driven approach using a wide-range of data sets and comprehensive methodologies.

Multifaceted Considerations for the Project

Expanding on the use of traditional considerations for the benefit-cost analysis, Alta incorporated additional ecosystem services benefit analysis and tourism projections into the Great Springs report. Evaluations were broken out by county to capture metrics on how regionally, various cities and municipalities across the project footprint could shop the report to secure capital for development from public funding, private investment, and bond initiative sources.

Digital Deliverables: Interactive storytelling and use of Rich Data Ecosystems

With increasing access to diverse and robust data sets like those provided by the ESRI living atlas and USGS, we were able to develop context-appropriate growth projections, natural asset analyses, and quantify positive side effects resulting from report conservation recommendations. Additionally, as a supplemental work product to the GSP Economic Benefits Report, Alta is currently building out an immersive and interactive digital storymap for the project. This type of interactive storytelling allowed users to engage with a variety of cloud hosted datasets that communicate the multisystem benefits of the Great Springs Trail vision. Alta produced a similar work product for the Singing River Trail Project in Huntsville, Alabama.

Alta conducted field work along the length of the trail to determine trail alignments, preview already planned alignments, and determine how to connect already built sections. We are now in the process of stakeholder and public engagement and design considerations.

Cross Discipline Lens in Preparing Communities for Change

As we move toward a more accelerated pace of change both technologically and in the built environment, tools such as these will become increasingly useful in creating resiliency plans for communities that address cross discipline issues beyond mobility analytics, such as ecosystem service degradation, water preservation, and carbon sequestration. We can help prepare communities for change by illuminating the interconnectedness of these factors and the importance of holistically considering and informing recommendations for future iconic trails plans such as the Great Springs Trail.

Next Steps for the Great Springs Trail

Some next steps in the development of the trail include hosting additional public engagement events and creating a draft plan focused on trail alignment and implementation recommendations. Alta will model some of the mapping methodologies used for the award winning Lower Russian River Trail plan for the Great Springs Trail.

We are constantly seeking to advance our mission through raising the bar on innovation while incorporating past successful approaches into new project work. Already many of the analytics tools and comprehensive methodologies implemented on the Economic Benefits Report for The Great Springs Trail are being applied to future projects involving interdisciplinary teams.

Stay tuned for more! In the meantime, learn more about Alta’s Signature Trails projects, and reach out to us if you’d like to start a conversation.

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Published in Alta

Sharing our collective experience in creating active, healthy communities.

Written by Alta

Creating active, healthy communities.

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