Tide to Town Trail in Savannah Now Connects More Miles

For years, the Truman Linear Trail had a very specific hole in it. Ride north from Lake Mayer Park and the pavement carried you smoothly to East DeRenne Avenue. From there, the next stretch of trail did not pick back up until 52nd Street and Bee Road, where the Police Memorial Trail began. In between those two points, there was nothing but ordinary road, so anyone trying to ride the whole thing had to drop into traffic for the middle section.

That gap is gone now. On July 6, the city held a ribbon-cutting for Phase 2B of the Truman Linear Trail at 1720 E. 58th Street, with Mayor Van Johnson, City Manager Jay Melder and District 3 Alderwoman Linda Wilder Bryan on hand. The new stretch fills in exactly that missing piece between DeRenne Avenue and 52nd Street and Bee Road, so the trail that used to dead-end mid-ride now runs straight through without a single detour onto traffic.

If you have lived here long enough to remember hitting that wall on a bike, this is the update that actually changes your route. Here's what's different, what it connects, and where the network still asks you to share the road.

Where the Trail Used to Just Stop

The gap that closed this summer was not a small oversight. It was the last unbuilt link in a project that Savannah has been trying to finish since a construction contract for $8,193,540 was awarded to JHC Corporation of Newnan back in February 2024. Crews broke ground that July at Costa Rica Street and East 58th, near the Holly Heights Community Garden, and spent roughly two years building a 10-foot-wide concrete path plus a timber bridge crossing and an 8-foot-wide protected path across the 52nd Street bridge over Truman Parkway.

The money came mostly from the city's hotel/motel tax, which the Georgia General Assembly increased to free up about $10 million for the trail system, with additional support from SPLOST VII and federal pandemic recovery funds. That funding structure matters if you have wondered why a bike path took this long: the corridor along the Casey Canal was first floated as a linear park idea back in the 1970s and kept resurfacing in planning documents through the 1990s before Bike Walk Savannah, then known as the Savannah Bicycle Campaign, started actively pushing for it in 2008. The original 3.1-mile segment did not open until November 2020. Phase 2B is the piece that finally closes the loop those decades of planning were aiming at.

What Actually Connects Now

With Phase 2B open, the trail runs continuously for about 7 miles along Truman Parkway, from the Police Memorial Trail on the north end to Lake Mayer Park on the south. Add the loop path around Lake Mayer and the loop through Daffin Park, and the connected off-road route totals roughly 9 miles, all without needing to merge onto a road.

Riding it end to end now looks like this:

• Start at Lake Mayer Park, part of the roughly 750-acre Bacon Regional Park tract, where you can park, use the restrooms, or let kids loose at the playground and skate park before you head out.
• Head north past the Scarborough Sports Complex, running alongside the Truman Parkway and the Casey Canal, to East DeRenne Avenue.
• From DeRenne Avenue, keep going onto the newly opened Phase 2B section, crossing the new bridge over Truman Parkway at 52nd Street, the exact stretch that used to force everyone onto pavement.
• Arrive at 52nd Street and Bee Road, where the trail now connects directly into the Police Memorial Trail.
• Detour into Daffin Park, all 77 acres of it, if you want a loop rather than a straight shot.

That's a genuinely different ride than the one Savannah residents have been making since the Police Memorial Trail and Phase 2A both existed but did not touch, which typically meant riding the finished sections and then figuring out your own way through the gap in between.

The trail was never purely recreational by design. City planners have pointed to Memorial Health University Medical Center as one of the destinations the route is meant to serve, meaning the same path that gets you to Lake Mayer on a Saturday morning can also get an employee to a shift without a car. That dual purpose is part of why this particular gap mattered more than a typical missing sidewalk: it was the piece standing between a nice weekend loop and an actual car-free way to get somewhere.

The Piece That's Still Missing

It would be easy to treat this as the whole story, but Phase 2B is one completed segment inside a much bigger plan. The city's vision for Tide to Town calls for more than 30 miles of trail eventually reaching 62 neighborhoods, 30 schools and three hospitals across every district in the city. What opened this summer accounts for a fraction of that.

Two extensions are still on paper rather than pavement. One would build a "Heritage Trail" connecting the Canal District and Enmarket Arena to downtown, a route that would matter a lot to anyone hoping to bike to an arena event instead of hunting for parking. The other is a studied corridor along Middleground Road, running from Georgia Southern's Armstrong Campus toward Montgomery Cross Road. Neither has a construction contract yet, so if your daily route runs through either of those corridors, you are still working with the road network you have today.

That downtown connection is still the honest gap. One rider who posted a trail account to a route-tracking site in early July described riding the full length of the Truman Trail onto the Police Memorial Trail, then, once that trail ran out, switching to surface streets to finish the trip into downtown along the river. Phase 2B fixed the middle of the route. It did not extend the trail into downtown itself, so that stretch still means sharing the road until the Heritage Trail gets built.

Worth knowing too: Tide to Town's own planning materials rank Georgia as the sixth most dangerous state in the country for pedestrians, which is part of why the city has prioritized separated paths like this one over painted bike lanes. That framing helps explain why Bike Walk Savannah, which has pushed for this corridor since 2008, and the Friends of Tide to Town coalition, formed in 2017, have kept the project moving for so long. It also suggests the next gap the city tackles is likely to take a similar amount of patience.

Worth a Ride Before the Weather Turns

If you have been putting off getting back on a bike or lacing up for a longer walk, this is a reasonable moment to try the full stretch. Late summer heat in Savannah is real, but the tree canopy along most of the route provides consistent shade, and the path itself is smooth, level and wide enough for families riding together. Whether you are commuting toward Memorial Health, looping the lake on a Sunday, or just curious what that new bridge crossing looks like in person, the trail that used to make you turn around now just keeps going.

Savannah changes in small, specific ways like this one all the time, and knowing them is part of what makes a neighborhood feel like home rather than just an address. If you are weighing a move within the city, thinking about what a property near a corridor like this is actually worth day to day, or just want a local perspective on what's coming next for a specific block, Move With Marcy is a good place to start that conversation. Schedule a consultation whenever you are ready.