The County Wide Active Transportation System project continues to roll on.
Construction is expected to get underway soon on the latest additions which include $3.6-million worth of paved shoulder pathways on County Rd. 20 in Leamington and County Rd. 50 in Kingsville and Essex.
"We've been allocating significant funds every year to build these facilities. So this is exciting that we're continuing on with these builds and these projects are tying into some existing ones. So every year we're actually creating more and more of these linear facilities," says Tom Bateman, Essex County's Director of Infrastructure Services.
Riders and walkers seen on the County Wide Active Transportation System (Photo courtesy of CWATS via Facebook)
He says the completed trails are well used.
"We're hearing very good things and what we're actually doing as well is after we complete these we go back and we monitor. We monitor for usage. We actually are doing some physical counts and really trying to gauge the use and we're actually looking at implementing some automated counting technology."
It's been five years since construction began on CWATS with roughly 300 kilometres of multi-use trails established so far.
The entire 800-kilometres is expected to take another 15 years.