There’s a new way for students, faculty, staff and the public to make their way onto Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s campus.
Madison County Transit leaders opened a roughly $3 million trail and bicycle-pedestrian bridge on Tuesday that provides another connection to the Metro East campus from the 138-mile trail network.
“This represents another step in helping to make Madison County one of the most bikeable places in the Midwest,” said SJ Morrison, managing director of Madison County Transit.
This new connector marks a third, more direct bike trail onto SIUE — with options now on three sides of campus.
Located on the northeast corner of campus, the new “Yellowhammer Connector” bridges the gap between SIUE and MCT’s Goshen Trail, which originates in Roxanna and runs south to O’Fallon, Illinois.
“The Goshen Trail is the spine of the system,” Morrison said. “The other trails kind of snake off the Goshen Trail, so it connects dozens of communities to the SIUE campus.”
The namesake for the trail comes from an early 20th-century streetcar corridor, which ran near where the new trail currently does. The streetcar was called the “yellowhammer” because the train cars were yellow and percussive sounds made by the train reminded residents of woodpeckers, Morrison said.
SIUE’s administration believes the new path will serve the community well. Home to more than 14,000 students, many of whom commute onto campus via the bike trails, as do faculty and staff, said Craig Holan, the director of facilities management at SIUE.
This connector will only expand opportunities for students or the community to get to and from campus, he said.
“It's been a positive asset for SIUE, and this is just going to enhance that,” Holan said.
The plan for this project had been a long time coming. The first concept came up in 2003 and had been in the works ever since.
Figuring how to engineer the trail through a heavily forested area and traverse a creek, without being too expensive, was a challenge until state funding became available, Morrison said.
In all, the 11-month project that started construction last November cost $2.95 million and was largely funded through a $3.1 million state grant program via Rebuild Illinois, a 2019 legislative priority of Gov. JB Pritzker that was passed by the Illinois General Assembly.
The remainder of the grant money will be used for another MCT project, also funded by Rebuild Illinois, at a bus station near the Gateway Commerce Center in Edwardsville and Pontoon Beach.
