The Trail Transect

Taking care of ourselves makes for a stronger community. Being active and being outdoors creates a better life! Americans love trails, they are the number one amenity people seek when locating a home. Here on the Trails Transect we explain and explore what trails are and how they function to serve people.

Trail Transect is: A classification system based on the correlation of the various elements by a common wilderness to inter-urban Transect. Six segments calibrate the Transect to the system-wide structure. These are Wilderness, Rural, Recreational, Neighborhood, Urban, and Inter-Urban.

Three categories (Natural, Developed Natural Surface, Paved Surface, or Urban) follow the system’s natural development and progression. The Inter-Urban is assigned to the intensification that occurs where several neighborhoods conjoin, while the Natural is outside the urbanized area.

Each zone is an immersive environment, a place where all the component elements reinforce each other to create and intensify a specific urban character. Several such immersive environments within a single neighborhood provide variegation in contrast to the consistent tracts of wilderness found on most Public Lands.

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Urban Designers plans are often accompanied by designs keyed to a Trail Transect. The Trail Transect will attempt to establish a blueprint for connecting people, regardless of economic status, to more opportunities through an expansive trail network which mirrors the systems of roadways. The impacts of the Trail Transect include the economic, health, social, psychological, and spiritual possibilities which can come about through better connectivity with people and opportunity. These networks will enable humans to walk more resulting in better physical health. These networks will increase encounters with other humans enabling each of them to be more connected with their communities increasing psychological and social health. These networks are built in environments which enable humans to experience nature more increasing mental and spiritual health.

The Trail Transect is a master planning tool that guides the placement and form of trails and landscape, allocates uses and volumes, and appropriately details adjoining spaces, including the selection of tree types and lighting poles where appropriate. A model Trail Transect, depicted below, was designed to be included in the Code as well as given to designers and builders. For simplicity is it divided into six zones, nicknamed “T-Zones”, which increase in intensity of development from the lessor wilderness and the untouched natural conditions (T2 and T1), towards higher T-zones (T5 and T6). Many earlier human settlements were organized this way, in which the walkable neighborhood with a center and an edge, provides this natural gradient. This can be seen in traditional towns around the world, from those recorded in the ancient scrolls of China to medieval English villages to pre-automobile American towns.

Trail Transect is a geographic cross-section of a region used to reveal a sequence of environments. For human-occupied environments, this cross-section can be used to identify a set of habitats that vary by their level and intensity of urban character – a continuum that ranges from wilderness to urban. This range of environments is the basis for organizing the components of the built world: surface, grade, landscaping, signage, and all of the other physical elements of these built connectors. In each environmental habitat along the wilderness to urban Trail Transect, “penetrative” environments are created – places that have wholeness and connectedness about them because of their particular combinations of elements.

The Trail Transect works by allocating elements that make up the environmental habitat keyed to appropriate geographic locations. For example, habitats that are wilderness might consist of narrow trails and irregular surfaces. Environmenta that are more urban and inter-urban will likely consist of multi-lane trails and public spaces. Accordingly, narrow trails and irregular surfaces should be allocated to more wilderness zones whereas multi-lane trails and public spaces should be allocated to more urban and inter-urban zones. This proper geographic “appropriation” serves to better integrate natural and urban systems because one is defined in tandem with the other. Conventional zones ignore this interrelationship.

The Trail Transect seeks to rectify the inappropriate braiding of wilderness and inter-urban elements. No desire for a particular type of development is categorically “wrong;” it is just in the wrong Trail Transect location. The Trail Transect eliminates the “urbanizing of the wilderness” – multi-lane trails and public spaces in otherwise pristine environments – or equally damaging, the “wildernessizing of the urban” – undefined, braided trails within the open space of the urban core. The prescribed urban pattern is therefore based, theoretically, on finding the proper balance between natural and human-made environments along the wilderness-to-urban Trail Transect.

In nature, the sequence of habitats is continuous, but in human environments, the wilderness-to-urban continuum must initially be segmented into discrete categories. This is dictated by the requirement that human habitats fit within the language of our current approach to land regulation – zoning. In other words, codes of perfectly familiar formats can be written based on Trail Transect Zones. To explain this more exactly, a diagram of the nomenclature of the Trail Transect is presented in Figure 1.

The Segmentation of the Trail Transect continuum is accomplished by dividing it into six different Trail Transect Zones: T1 – Wilderness, T2 – Rural, T3 – Recreational, T4-Neighborhood, T5 – Urban, and T6 – Inter-Urban. While these categories work well, it is important to note that other immersive categories have been proposed that somewhat resemble the zones discussed here. Brower’s typology of neighborhoods is one example.

The Trail Transect approach is essentially a matter of finding an appropriate spatial allocation of the elements that make up the human habitat. Wilderness elements should be located in wilderness locations, while urban elements should be located in more urban locations – not unlike natural ecological systems where plant and animal species coexist within habitats that best support them. In the Trail Transect system, urban development is distributed so that it strengthens rather than stresses the integrity of each immersive environment. The Trail Transect approach also controls the geographic extent of zones, disallowing the creation of large monocultures of any one particular type of Trail Transect Zone.

The Trail Transect should also be viewed as a way of applying good urban principles to a range of human habitats. The idea is that human environments should be pedestrian-oriented, and diverse, and the public is intrinsic to each type of environment along the Trail Transect. The Trail Transect approach also factors in the element of time, as a Trail Transect Zone can change to another type of immersive environment (usually one of higher urban intensity – though at the current moment we are likely to be seeing mostly devolution of sprawl, returning to a more wilderness character and only occasionally intensifying where appropriate).