Long Island is one of the most heavily populated stretches of land in the country and one of the hardest places on the East Coast to get around without a car. There are 118 miles of island, a rail line that runs east and west and almost never north and south, and a road network that treats a bicycle as an inconvenience. For a region with this much shoreline, park land and pine barren, remarkably little of it can be reached on foot or on two wheels.

That is the gap the Long Island Greenway is built to close. The plan, led by the national nonprofit Trust for Public Land, is a continuous protected trail running from Manhattan to Montauk. After several years of feasibility studies and funding rounds, the first shovels are scheduled to go into the ground this year.

What is actually being built first

The opening move is the Brentwood to Bethpage Connector, a 12-mile segment funded by a $16.4 million federal grant awarded to Suffolk County through the U.S. Department of Transportation's RAISE program. RAISE money is aimed at infrastructure projects that cross jurisdictional lines, which describes a Long Island trail almost perfectly: any useful route here has to negotiate two counties, multiple towns, a state park system and a railroad.

The segment's eastern end ties into Suffolk County Community College in Brentwood. Its western end lands near Bethpage State Park and Farmingdale State College. In between, it is designed to connect riders and walkers to more than 100 bus stops, the Deer Park LIRR station, and the employment corridor along Route 110, which is one of the densest concentrations of jobs anywhere in Nassau or Suffolk.

Trust for Public Land puts the broader construction timeline at the trail's first 25 miles beginning in 2026, with roughly $35 million secured across the project to date.

Why Brentwood and Wyandanch first

The choice of the first segment was not a matter of picking the prettiest woods. Brentwood and Wyandanch are among the communities on Long Island where the fewest households have reliable access to a car and where residents are most likely to be walking along roads that were never designed for it.

Suffolk County consistently ranks among the top five counties in New York State for fatal vehicle crashes. A protected, off-road route through exactly these neighborhoods is a traffic safety project as much as a recreation project, and Trust for Public Land has framed it that way from the start. The organization also projects the segment will cut roughly 250,000 pounds of transportation-related carbon emissions a year by giving people an alternative to short car trips.

The connection that makes it more than a local trail

New York State opened the Empire State Trail in 2020: 750 continuous miles running from Plattsburgh in the north and Buffalo in the west, meeting in Albany and continuing south to the Battery at the tip of Manhattan. It is one of the longest multi-use trail networks in the country, and it stops dead at the edge of Manhattan.

Everything east of that point, more than eight million people across Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau and Suffolk, is left off the map. Linking the Long Island Greenway to the Empire State Trail is the piece that turns a regional amenity into a genuine national connection.

The five sections, and how far off the rest of it is

Trust for Public Land has the full route broken into five sections:

  • Section 1: Eisenhower Park to Brentwood State Park, 25 miles
  • Section 2: The South Fork, Riverhead to Montauk, 50 miles
  • Section 3: Riverhead to Brentwood, 40 miles
  • Section 4: Riverhead to Orient Point, 35 miles
  • Section 5: The Manhattan Connection, 38 miles

Only Section 1 has construction money behind it. The other four are planned, mapped and unfunded, which is worth keeping in mind when the project is described as imminent. Long Island has a long history of ambitious regional plans that arrive one segment at a time or not at all.

Total mileage figures have shifted as the alignment has been refined. The 2025 grant announcement described a 175-mile network linking 27 communities and 26 parks; Trust for Public Land's current project materials describe it as nearly 200 miles putting 90 communities within a 10-minute walk of a trail, with a projected five million visitors a year. Once finished, the organization says roughly 60 percent of the route would be fully off-road.

Who is behind it

The Brentwood to Bethpage Connector is a joint effort between Trust for Public Land and Suffolk County, with support from Friends of the Long Island Greenway, New York State Parks and the Town of Huntington. The federal funding was secured with backing from Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.

Tamar Renaud, Trust for Public Land's New York State Director, described the segment at the time of the award as a way of "creating protected off-road spaces for people to walk, bike, and move safely across the communities of Long Island."

Huntington Town Supervisor Ed Smyth, whose town the route passes through, called the grant "an exceptional stepping-stone to begin the long-awaited Long Island Greenway chain of trails."

What to watch for

For anyone living along the corridor, the near-term signals are design work, public meetings and utility surveys rather than pavement. Trail projects of this scale typically spend longer in design and right-of-way negotiation than in construction, and a 12-mile route crossing this many jurisdictions has a lot of both ahead of it.

Still, the difference between this and the last several decades of Long Island trail proposals is straightforward: this one has a construction grant attached to a specific 12 miles. That is a meaningfully different thing from a map.