HOK’s Planning team has participated in greenway planning here in the St. Louis area for more than a decade. Mark Vogl, Jeannette Thompson, Rachel Peine and I recently broke out of the office for a couple of field trips to take stock of how far the Great Rivers Greenway District has come in carrying out the region’s citizen-driven vision for a interconnected park and trail system. Though our own personal experiences using different segments of the system have been fantastic, our little tours still were eye-opening — the trails were busy and quite beautiful.

Here’s a little video compilation of people using the trail.

There have been lots of Life at HOK posts on cycling and bike commuting. Here’s a true “HOKoincidence:” On one of our trail explorations we bumped into Steven Crang, a structural engineer in the St. Louis office, walking on the Deer Creek Park Trail toward his local MetroLink station to take the light-rail train downtown to the office. Steven is our hardest-core bike commuter, but that day he was traveling by foot and train because his Lemond road bike was in the shop. So we played TMZ by shoving a Flip camera in his face and asking about the trails and his reasons for commuting by bike:

Thanks for playing along, Steven. We noticed you running toward the station after our interview. Hope you didn’t miss your train!