Photo by Erin Nelson. Starnes Media
Inverness Greenway Letter
Vehicles travel along Inverness Parkway past the Inverness Nature Park and Trails in Hoover on Friday, Dec. 11, 2020. The city of Hoover and Shelby County plan to add sidewalks along Inverness Parkway as part of the Inverness Greenway project. Photo by Erin Nelson.
I don’t know if you have seen pictures of the old train station in downtown Birmingham. It was a great piece of city history and architecture that was lost due to highway construction, never to be recovered.
Although America has lost some iconic structures to progress over the years, there are also some other points of beauty that can be endangered by urbanization. My example here is the Inverness Greenway project that the city of Hoover will soon begin.
It is essentially a super-sized sidewalk up to 10 feet wide that will stretch from Valleydale Road to the Hoover Inverness Nature Park, a distance of several miles. It amounts to miles of concrete and has been under consideration and back and forth talk for 15 years.
If you have not, I would encourage you to drive Inverness Parkway that connects Valleydale and U.S. 280. It is a grass and tree-lined two lane connecting various neighborhoods. Take a look at the roadside as you drive.
Where else in our area can you find such a road with trees, grass and some nice curves and hills along the way? It is a rarity, and it is about to be altered for the worse.
Ten feet of concrete will mean the loss of trees and sloping shoulders. It is meant to be a pathway for bikes and walkers, but there are many streets and lanes on either side of the “parkway” to accommodate those activities. The Hoover City Engineer’s office said it will not be open to motorized vehicles, but such is unenforceable and there are plenty of golf cars in the area that will challenge that.
I walk the “parkway” shoulder most every day and knobby tired pickups, squeaky trailers filled with grass-cutting equipment and large-truck cut throughs from U.S. 280 to Valleydale create a good amount of noise pollution, making walking often less than pleasant for your piece of mind.
The real question here is why do we need a lane of cement up to 10 feet wide? If you want to accommodate walkers and bikes, does a bike lane or 3 feet of cement work as well? I would answer yes to that, and yes to less hot cement replacing air cooling trees.
I would encourage you to drive Inverness Parkway, look at it as it is now and imagine it with a cement path up to 10 feet wide on one side.
Some things are better left the way they are to enjoy now and for future enjoyment. If you would, park and walk along the parkway and experience the sound of the traffic. This parkway looks great, but it is not a park like the walking path at Spain Park or the main road through Oak Mountain State Park where groups of bikes often rule the road.
One final thought: If you live on or near the parkway on either side, think about how the removal of trees that buffer the sound of the traffic will affect the “quiet enjoyment,” as lawyers would call it, of your property. That loss of a noise buffer will mostly fall on the shoulders of certain residents of Selkirk, Summerwood, Kirkwall, Woodford, Afton and Inverness Point.
I understand we are only a short time away from this project, but I would urge the city of Hoover to rethink its plans and scale them back or do away with them entirely.
Submitted by Clifford Brane, Inverness resident.
