A runner heading south on Westenedge Drive this month will hit orange construction fencing where the sidewalk used to be. No sign explains what's coming, just a gap in the route and a detour onto the street shoulder. That gap is not neglect. It is one piece of the largest stretch of trail-building Columbus has done in years, and almost none of it has been announced the way a ribbon-cutting usually gets announced.
If you have lived here long enough to have a favorite loop, whether that's the river bend at Mill Race Park or the quiet stretch past Clifty Park, it is worth knowing what is actually changing under your feet this year, because the trail you think you know is being redrawn while you use it.
The Number Nobody Can Agree On
Ask how long the People Trail is and you will get four different answers depending on where you look. TrailLink lists it at 15.7 miles running from the West Hill Shopping Center to River Road. Strand Associates, the engineering firm that designed one of the trail's key river crossings, describes it as a 15-mile system. A visitor review on TripAdvisor puts it at 19 miles, running from the airport in the northeast down past the interstate to State Road 46. The city's own tourism site advertises more than 30 miles.
None of these are wrong. They are measuring different things. Columbus Parks and Recreation is explicit about this on its own project page: the People Trail is a subset of the city's overall bicycle and pedestrian network, a system within a larger system that also includes on-street bike lanes and sidewalks that were never part of the paved, off-road People Trail itself. The 15 to 16 mile figures describe the core paved trail. The 30-plus mile figure is the full network, lanes and sidewalks included, that the Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan is slowly stitching together.
That distinction matters if you're planning an actual route rather than reading a brochure. The paved, car-free trail is the smaller number. Everything past that is city streets with varying degrees of bike infrastructure, and 2026 is the year several of those in-between gaps finally get closed.
What's Changing on the Ground This Year
The Columbus Park Foundation keeps a running list of active and planned People Trail projects. Two are explicitly marked for construction this year. A few more sit right behind them as top priorities. Together they're the ones worth knowing about if you ride or walk regularly:
- Westenedge Drive Shared Use Path Extension (2026 construction), running between Rocky Ford Road and Parkside Drive, which will connect directly into the existing Blackwell Park People Trail to the north. This is the fencing the runner hit.
- Talley Road Improvement (2026 construction), covering the stretch between 25th Street and Rocky Ford Road, adding a shared use path on the east side of the street and a sidewalk on the west.
- Rocky Ford Road Shared Use Path Extension (next in line), listed as a Tier 1 immediate priority in the city's Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan, paired with intersection upgrades at Rocky Ford Road and Nugent Drive to make that crossing safer for anyone walking or biking to school, a park, or a shop nearby.
- Lowell Road Improvement Project (next in line), a joint effort between the City of Columbus and Bartholomew County in an area seeing new residential growth, adding a shared use path that will extend west across the Barnaby Acres subdivision.
- The 1821 Trail (next in line), a Bicentennial legacy project planned along 1st Street to connect the Riverfront Project at Brown Street to the existing path at Lafayette Avenue, considered the most important remaining gap south of downtown.
These are not random resurfacing jobs. They target the exact complaints that show up in years of trail reviews: sections that dead-end into unmarked neighborhood streets, crossings that feel unsafe, corridors with no sidewalk at all. Anyone who has biked Talley Road and had to guess where the path picks back up will recognize why that particular gap made the list.
There's a quieter project worth mentioning too. A short connector trail planned behind Parkside School would link directly to Freedom Field Playground, which happens to be the largest accessible playground in the state of Indiana. It's meant to solve a real problem for families in that part of town, whose kids currently have to cross a bus and vehicle lane on foot to get from the school to the playground.
The Bridge With a Previous Life
The trail's most interesting engineering story isn't new construction at all. It's a rescue.
Years ago, the trail's path across 25th Street, one of the busiest roads in the city, was so uncomfortable that many users simply avoided that section rather than deal with the crossing. Rather than build something new, the city and its engineers relocated a century-old steel truss bridge from Newbern Road and used it to carry the trail over Haw Creek instead, bypassing the intersection entirely.
The result is a half-mile extension between 25th Street and Lincoln Park that let a historic bridge keep working instead of getting scrapped, while giving residents on the east side of Bartholomew County a route that no longer forces a detour along Clifty Creek. It's the kind of fix that looks simple from a bike seat and was anything but simple to engineer.
Where the Trail Actually Takes You
Strip away the mileage debate and the construction updates, and the trail is really a string of parks connected by pavement. Start at Noblitt Park along the Flat Rock river and you can ride south into Mill Race Park, an 85-acre stretch of walking trails, a playground, and a scenic tower sitting at the bend where two rivers meet. Head north instead and the trail threads through downtown toward Lincoln Park's 30 acres, crosses the relocated Newbern Road bridge, and continues up to Blackwell Park and Clifty Park.
None of this requires a car, a fee, or advance planning. It's the same loop locals have ridden for years. What's changing in 2026 is how many of the awkward in-between segments, the ones that dumped you onto a street with no shoulder, are finally getting filled in.
The Payoff at the North End
Ride the trail far enough north and it ends near Columbus Municipal Airport, at the Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum. The museum's centerpiece is a restored C-119 "Flying Boxcar," nicknamed the "City of Columbus," and on the second Saturday of most months, except January and February, the aircraft's interior opens to the public for free walkthroughs led by volunteers who can talk you through its restoration and its history flying out of the old Bakalar Air Force Base.
The museum runs regular hours Thursday through Saturday, but the open-cockpit Saturdays are the reason to actually plan a ride around it. As recently as this past July, the museum hosted an expanded open house built around exactly this event, drawing residents and out-of-town guests alike for a look inside the aircraft. It's a low-key destination that most people driving past on the highway never notice, and it sits right at the point where the trail's northern section quietly runs out.
If you already live here, the trail isn't a feature you evaluate once and forget. It's changing shape this year, one construction fence and one filled-in gap at a time, and the version you'll be riding by next summer will connect a few more of the places you already go.
If you're weighing a move within Columbus and want a read on how a specific street or neighborhood connects to all of this, from Barnaby Acres to the streets feeding into the Rocky Ford corridor, the team at Hillary Maple | The Nolting Team knows these blocks well enough to talk through it in plain terms. Reach out when you're ready to talk specifics.
