Bennett Meares doesn't live in North Main, but most weeks he rides his bike up North Main Street to get a coffee at Other Lands. He's not quiet about what that ride feels like. After the city walked back a long-discussed plan to bring the Swamp Rabbit Trail into the neighborhood, Meares told The Post and Courier the road he takes to get there is "one of the scarier routes that I've taken, just because the road design isn't great."
That's the part of this story most North Main residents already know in their bones, even if they've never put it into words. What a lot of people don't know is how close the neighborhood came to fixing it, and why that fix disappeared.
The Workaround Everyone Already Knows
Right now, if you live in North Main and want to get on the actual Swamp Rabbit Trail on foot or by bike, you have two options, and neither one starts at your front door. City Councilmember John DeWorken laid it out plainly in an April 2026 interview: residents typically access the trail by traveling down Main Street to Falls Park, or by crossing Rutherford Road and Pete Hollis Boulevard to reach the trail near the Amtrak train station.
Neither route is short, and neither was built with a five-year-old on a bike in mind. That's the daily reality behind all the meeting agendas and consultant slides. It's also exactly what the city has spent the past year trying to solve, with a plan that got further than most people realize before it stalled.
How Close the Neighborhood Actually Got
North Main has been asking for this for longer than most residents have owned their homes. At an October 2025 meeting, DeWorken put a number on it: "I've heard from North Main neighbors for seven years now wanting a connection to the Swamp Rabbit Trail."
The project that finally seemed to answer that request is called the Orange Line, and it has two separate halves. Greenville County is handling one piece already: a 1.5-mile extension along an inactive rail corridor that runs from Buncombe Road to Worley Road, ending near Other Lands on Rutherford Road. That part isn't controversial and isn't stalled. It's the city's half, the stretch that would actually run through North Main to reach the Church Street and Wade Hampton Boulevard intersection near Harris Teeter, that turned into the harder conversation.
The city and its consulting team, Alta Planning and Design and AECOM, spent 2025 studying how to thread that needle. At a public meeting on July 30, 2025, they laid out the real choices: which street would carry the trail from Worley Road toward Rutherford Road, and which street would carry it through the heart of the neighborhood after that.
- Connector segment: Renrick Drive or Graves Drive, linking Worley Road to Rutherford Road
- Neighborhood segment: North Main Street or Summit Drive, carrying the trail south toward downtown
Summit Drive resident Erik Anderson was in the room for that vote. "We ended up voting for one of the North Main options," he said. By October 2025, the city had a preferred answer, according to WSPA's coverage of the decision: the trail would run from Other Lands down North Main Street, then turn east on Gallivan Street toward The Community Tap, before continuing on to the Church Street and Wade Hampton intersection. More than 860 people had weighed in on the route options by that point, up from the 660-plus who'd responded to the city's initial survey earlier that year.
There was one detail in this plan that made it more than just another sidewalk project. Calin Owens, the city's capital projects manager for mobility, pointed out that this stretch would have been the first section of the entire Swamp Rabbit Trail system to run directly through an established neighborhood, not alongside it or around it, but through it, past front yards and driveways. That distinction is also what ended up being the plan's undoing.
The Reversal
By February 2026, the North Main Street and Gallivan Street segment was dead. The Post and Courier reported that city council members and staff pulled back after hearing sustained pushback from the very neighbors the trail was meant to serve. The objections weren't abstract. Residents raised concerns about sidewalks, driveways, and trash pickup, about how a trail running past their homes would change the look and feel of streets that had never been designed for that kind of traffic.
DeWorken, who had spent seven years hearing the opposite request, put the reversal in blunt terms:
"People really got to want it. The neighbors really got to want it, and they just really didn't."
It's a strange kind of ending. A project born from years of residents asking for exactly this kind of connection got stopped by the residents who would have lived closest to it. Brann Fowler, whose family lives on Gallivan Street, told the paper he was disappointed and hoped the city would revisit the decision eventually. For now, that's not the plan.
What the city didn't walk away from is safety at the two intersections that matter most for anyone already making this trip on foot or by bike. City Communications Director Beth Brotherton confirmed that projects improving pedestrian and cyclist safety at Rutherford Road and Wade Hampton Boulevard, the exact corridor Meares complained about, are still moving forward. That's a real commitment, but it's a narrower one than what was on the table back in October 2025.
What's Left, and What Isn't
Two months after the reversal, the Greenville Journal reported that the city had "refined its plans" for connecting North Main to the Orange Line. Read closely, though, that update mostly restates the same unresolved shape of the problem: the county's Buncombe-to-Worley segment is still on schedule, the destination at Church Street and Wade Hampton is still the goal, and DeWorken is still describing the neighborhood's lack of direct access in the same terms he used before the city pulled back on the North Main Street route. No new through-neighborhood corridor has been announced to replace the one that got shelved in February.
The broader Orange Line timeline gives some sense of pace here. City staff had projected roughly a year of engineering work once a final route was chosen, with construction bids expected in late 2026 or early 2027. That clock was built around the assumption that a route through the neighborhood existed. Right now, it doesn't. The county's piece to Worley Road can move on that schedule regardless. The piece that would actually reach into North Main is back to square one.
So if you're the person Bennett Meares was describing, riding North Main Street to get a coffee, or the parent deciding whether your kid can bike to Other Lands alone, the practical answer for at least the next year or two is the same one it's been for the last seven: down Main Street to Falls Park, or across Rutherford and Pete Hollis to the trail near the Amtrak station. The safety improvements at Rutherford and Wade Hampton should make that crossing a little less hair-raising. A trail through the middle of the neighborhood itself is, for now, back to being a conversation rather than a plan.
North Main has always been a neighborhood people choose because they can get somewhere on foot, to Stone Avenue, to Falls Park, to Other Lands on a Saturday morning. This particular gap in that walkability isn't closing as fast as it looked like it might last fall, and it's worth knowing that before you hear the next update secondhand at the counter.
If you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in a neighborhood like North Main, that kind of granular, up-to-date read on infrastructure and local decision-making is exactly the sort of thing Ashley Swann tracks closely for clients making a move in Greenville. Let's Connect.
