For seven years, North Main residents asked city council the same question whenever someone showed up for a listening session or a road project update. Greenville City Councilmember John DeWorken put it plainly at an October 2025 meeting: "I've heard from North Main neighbors for seven years now wanting a connection to the Swamp Rabbit Trail." By last October, it looked like the wait was almost over. A feasibility study had scored a route down North Main Street and over to Gallivan Street as the cheapest, best-performing option on the table. Then, in February, the Post and Courier reported the whole thing was off.
If you stopped reading there, you'd think North Main lost its shot at a real trail connection. That's not what happened. What actually happened is more useful to know if you live here and walk or bike to Other Lands or the Community Tap on any kind of regular basis: the city didn't cancel the project, it cut it into two smaller pieces and moved both of them to the edges of the neighborhood, leaving the middle exactly as it was.
The Plan That Died in February
The original idea, studied in depth through 2025, ran the Prisma Health Swamp Rabbit Trail's Orange Line from Other Lands at Rutherford Road down North Main Street, then east on Gallivan Street to the Community Tap. Consultants liked it. At an October work session, the Gallivan Street and North Main treatments scored highest on both community input and cost per mile, according to a presentation from Alta Planning principal Jean Crowder, who noted the corridor serves more than 5,000 North Main residents.
The trouble was in the details nobody had settled yet: whether the trail would eat the neighborhood's tree-lined median, how it would cross driveways, what happened to street parking, and whether trash pickup would still work the same way. Residents who live on Gallivan Street, where the trail would have run directly past their homes, spoke up. Brann Fowler, whose family lives there, told the Post and Courier he was "really excited" when the project looked likely, and just as disappointed when it fell apart. But the pushback from neighbors worried about front yards and driveways won out. By February 12, DeWorken confirmed to the paper that the extension was off the table.
What the City Rebuilt in April
Here's the part that got less attention. Two months after the scrap story ran, the Greenville Journal reported the city had come back with a different shape for the same goal. Instead of one continuous trail running through the residential core, the city split the project into two separate connections at opposite edges of North Main.
On the northwest side, the Orange Line would extend from Worley Road to Rutherford Road, with a new pedestrian crossing added at Rutherford to make that approach safer. On the southeast side, a second connection would run from Mohawk Drive, near the Community Tap, to the intersection of Wade Hampton Boulevard and North Church Street, with pedestrian crossing improvements there too. In between those two points, through the actual residential blocks of North Main, trail users would rely on the bike lanes and sidewalks that already exist. No new path. No median redesign. No front-yard encroachment.
"At the end of the day, I think people love sidewalks and bike lanes, but they just were not enthusiastic to have the trail go in their front yard."
That's DeWorken's own explanation for why the middle of the project disappeared while the edges survived. City communications director Beth Brotherton framed the retreat as fiscal prudence, saying the change would help "balance the desires of both trail users and residents" rather than fund an expensive build that split the neighborhood.
The Two Doors North Main Actually Has
If you're trying to get from a house in North Main to the broader Swamp Rabbit Trail network today, the practical routes haven't changed since before any of this started, but knowing where the city is investing tells you which door is about to get easier to use.
- Northwest, via Rutherford Road. This is the Other Lands side of the neighborhood, at 731 Rutherford Road. It's also the route DeWorken described residents already taking: down Rutherford and across Pete Hollis Boulevard to reach the trail near the Amtrak station. Once the new pedestrian crossing at Rutherford is built, this becomes the safer of the two established paths, though the city had not announced a construction timeline as of the April update.
- Southeast, via Mohawk Drive and Wade Hampton. This side lands you near the Community Tap's North Main location on Wade Hampton Boulevard. The planned crossing improvements at Wade Hampton and North Church Street target exactly the intersection cyclist Bennett Meares called "one of the scarier routes that I've taken," a fair description of a spot where a bike lane currently dead-ends into a busy commercial corridor.
- Straight down Main Street to Falls Park. This is the route that predates any of the planning, and it still works. It's longer and puts you on Main Street traffic rather than a dedicated trail, but it's the most direct option if you're headed downtown rather than north toward Travelers Rest.
None of these routes are new. What's new is that two of them are getting formal safety investment while the third, the one that would have cut straight through the neighborhood's interior, is permanently off the table.
The Detour Happening This Month
While the trail crossings are still in planning, a separate and more immediate project is already changing how North Main streets feel to drive or bike on. As of early August, the city is in the middle of a $1.7 million repaving project touching 19 Greenville streets, and Randall and Whitehall streets inside North Main are part of it. Crews are milling, repaving, and restriping, and once the striping is finished, the city plans to install lane separators between bicycle and vehicle lanes on the completed sections. It's unrelated to the trail connector story, but it's the piece of construction most residents will actually notice this month if they drive Randall or Whitehall regularly.
So What Changed, Really
The easy read of this whole saga is that North Main asked for a trail and didn't get one. The more accurate read is that North Main asked for a trail and got something narrower but arguably more targeted: money and design attention aimed at the two specific points where the existing routes are genuinely unsafe, Rutherford Road and the Wade Hampton and North Church Street intersection, rather than a full rebuild of the neighborhood's interior streets.
That's a meaningfully different outcome than "canceled," and it's also different from "built as planned." If you already walk to Other Lands for a Saturday morning coffee or bike over to the Community Tap for a food truck night, the route itself won't look different anytime soon. What should look different, eventually, is how it feels to cross Rutherford Road or get through the Wade Hampton intersection on a bike, since those are the two spots the city is actually funding.
North Main has always run on this kind of incremental civic negotiation, a neighborhood old enough to have a genuine say in what happens to its own medians and driveways, and organized enough to make that say count. Watching how a trail request turns into two crossing projects is a decent way to understand how the neighborhood actually operates, whether you're headed out for a walk tonight or just trying to figure out why the crosswalk at Wade Hampton might look different a year from now.
If you're curious about more of what shapes daily life in North Main, from the businesses anchoring Stone Avenue to how city planning decisions like this one tend to play out here, The Gallo Company keeps a close eye on the neighborhood for exactly this reason. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually happening, not just what got announced.
