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OV Trails Connect: town and consultant launch trails master plan and community outreach; public survey opens Feb. 24
Summary
Planning staff and Kimley-Horn presented OV Trails Connect, a trails and multiuse-path master plan, showing preliminary legal-access mapping and Strava heat maps as background. Staff announced an interactive website and a public survey (Feb. 24Mar. 17) and invited participation in stakeholder meetings beginning March 12.
Alex Chavez, a planner with the Town of Oro Valley, and Marissa Pellegrini, a landscape architect and planner with Kimley-Horn, presented the OV Trails Connect project to the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board on Feb. 18.
Chavez said the project will focus on unpaved trails and paved multiuse paths (MUPs) separate from sidewalks and bike lanes, and will produce goals, recommendations and an action plan. "OV Trails Connect is the fruit of that labor," Chavez said, explaining the brand and outreach plan. He said the planning team completed a parcel-by-parcel legal-access review and used crowd-sourced Strava data as a preliminary indicator of where people travel on foot and by bicycle.
Pellegrini outlined limitations of the Strava dataset and emphasized it is a directional "breadcrumb" dataset that skewed to users who track fitness activities. The presenters said the Strava heat maps helped identify likely high-use corridors (the Loop, Big Wash Trail, Rancho Vistoso corridors and the Vistoso Trails Nature Preserve) and will be complemented by a town survey, in-person "trailside" outreach, stakeholder meetings and an interactive mapping tool on the project website.
The board and staff discussed how sidewalks, separated multiuse paths and trail alignment would be treated in the plan. Chavez and Pellegrini said the team will treat sidewalks and road-adjacent paths as distinct layers during analysis and that the plan will document where nonmotorized connections are missing.
Board members asked how the project would address users not represented in the crowd-sourced data and how ADA accessibility and maintenance issues would be captured. Pellegrini said the survey includes questions about ADA access and barriers and that stakeholder meetings will solicit additional detail on parking, equestrian needs and surface maintenance concerns such as sand accumulation on multiuse paths.
Outreach details: the project website (ovtrailsconnect.com) is live with an interactive map for pin-drop comments; the community survey launches Feb. 24 and closes March 17; the trail stakeholder group begins meeting March 12; and the consultant and staff plan three stakeholder sessions and 30/60/90% check-ins with council and the board.
