Lawrence Township awards engineering contract to design and construct segment of trail. The awarded segment is the last part of the trail in the township to be designed and constructed.
The Lawrence Hopewell Trail keeps growing.
The Lawrence Township Council awarded a contract to Engineering firm WSP for $19,946 to design the Pretty Brook Road segment of the trail at its April 18 meeting. The 1,800-foot-long segment is the last part of the trail in Lawrence Township to be designed and constructed, officials said.
The Pretty Brook Road trail section will be built along the south side of Pretty Brook Road, from its intersection with Cleveland Road in Hopewell Township to its intersection with Province Line Road.
The trail is proposed to be 10 feet wide. It will be built using a combination of porous pavement, boardwalk sections and a pedestrian footbridge crossing over an unnamed tributary.
The trail alignment may meander to avoid utility poles and reduce impacts to property owners’ driveways, mailboxes, landscape walls and trees, officials said.
At the intersection of Pretty Brook Road and Province Line Road, the Lawrence Hopewell Trail continues on Province Line Road. It crosses over an existing bridge over Stony Brook that was closed years ago to cars and trucks. Pedestrians and bicyclists use it to cross over Stony Brook, linking it to the segment of the trail that passes through the Educational Testing Service property.
Additional segments of the trail make their way from the Educational Testing Service campus to the Carson Road Woods and then through Lawrence Township and into Hopewell Township.
The 22-mile-long Lawrence Hopewell Trail grew out of a meeting of community leaders to discuss the lack of opportunities for safe, off-road bicycling and walking activities in 2001.
The Lawrence Hopewell Trail Corp. was formed to explore the possibility of creating a bicycle and walking trail. The goal was to link the two townships through the off-road bicycle and walking trail.
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and the Educational Testing Service joined forces in 2002 to encourage the creation of the trail. Their campuses served as the physical anchors for the trail, and provided financial support for the nonprofit Lawrence Hopewell Trail Corp.
The first segment of the trail was constructed in 2004, and additional segments have been built through the years in Lawrence and Hopewell townships.