Camden County has finally broken ground on the LINK Trail, a planned 34-mile paved shared-use route that will run through 17 municipalities from the Benjamin Franklin Bridge area to lower Winslow Township near the Gloucester County line. The first active stretch is the roughly one-mile segment between Merchant Street in Audubon and Station Avenue in Haddon Heights. On paper, it’s exactly the kind of regional project South Jersey ought to be backing: practical, visible, and capable of linking parks, downtowns, neighbourhoods and existing trails into something people can actually use. 

And that’s why it’s worth saying out loud that the LINK Trail could be one of Camden County’s smartest public investments in years. Not because it sounds nice in a press release, and not because every trail project automatically becomes a civic triumph, but because this one answers a real need. Safe places to walk and cycle are still patchy across much of the county. The LINK is meant to function as the spine of a wider county trail network, tying together urban, suburban and rural areas while feeding people towards parks, business districts and the broader Circuit Trails system.  If it’s built properly, it changes how people move.