Corridor | Barbados Trailway Project
Barbados is small enough to cross in under an hour. A coral island in the eastern Caribbean, it measures just 430 square kilometers. Once structured almost entirely around sugar production under British colonial rule, Barbados spent centuries organized as a monoculture economy, its landscape shaped by plantations, export infrastructure, and the movement of goods outward toward empire. Today, tourism has superseded sugar as the island’s economic engine. The railways are gone. The plantations remain visible in fragments.
The island now has roughly 180,000 cars for a population of 290,000 people, one of the highest rates of car ownership in the hemisphere. The consequences are compressed into Barbados’ limited geography: severe congestion, rising costs of living, an emergent public health crisis tied to inactivity, obesity, and type 2 diabetes, and road networks increasingly overwhelmed. On certain stretches of road, it can take an hour to travel five kilometers. Barbados, according to Barney Gibbs, “has a car problem disguised as a development success story.”
Gibbs is one of the leading figures behind the Barbados Trailway Project, an effort to convert a former colonial sugar railway into a 38-kilometer public greenway for walking and cycling. The project is ambitious not simply because of its scale relative to the island, but because of what it attempts to address simultaneously. Transportation. Public health. Climate resilience. Public space. Tourism. Historical access. The project sits at a remarkable intersection.
At first glance, the Trailway resembles many rail-to-trail projects elsewhere in the world; a disused transportation corridor being transformed into public infrastructure. But in Barbados, the historical context adds significant meaning to the endeavor. The railway itself was built in the nineteenth century to move sugar from plantations to the capital, Bridgetown, for export. When the railway ceased operations in 1938, the British colonial government removed the tracks for wartime steel, but the corridor remained behind as a largely unrecognized easement cutting through the island.
For decades, many Barbadians living near, even directly beside, the corridor remained unaware of their right to use it. Gibbs told a story about receiving a phone call from a man who lived less than a kilometer from the Trailway route. The man wanted to teach his daughter to ride a bicycle and called to ask permission to walk in the corridor. Gibbs explained to him that no permission was required. It was public land and had been for years. But the man still worried someone would accuse him of trespassing or embarrass him in front of his child.
As a colonial logistics corridor being actively modified into a public commons, the Trailway is not simply about building bike infrastructure, but about transforming the psychological understanding of land and access in the particular context of Barbados’ colonial past. In that sense, the project operates as a form of local reparative infrastructure. Not reparations in the form of direct payments, but repair enacted spatially through access, health, movement, and public ownership.
Barbados today is politically stable and increasingly climate-focused under Prime Minister Mia Mottley, whose international profile has elevated discussions around climate resilience and sustainability across the island. Mottley has emerged as one of the most prominent political voices from the Global South, particularly around climate justice, debt restructuring, and the disproportionate vulnerability of small island nations to environmental change. Her government has increasingly framed Barbados not simply as a tourism economy, but as a small island developing state navigating existential questions around infrastructure, resilience, and development.
That broader political atmosphere matters for projects like the Trailway. Gibbs believes the administration’s emphasis on sustainability has created greater institutional openness toward active transportation and public environmental projects. At the same time, the pressures facing the island have become impossible to ignore. Barbados has some of the highest rates of childhood obesity and diabetes in the world. Inactivity from a lack of safe infrastructure for walking and cycling acts as a major contributor.
“The Trailway is really being built for the school child that right now cannot ride to school because there’s no safe way for them to do so,” Gibbs said. Much of the discussion around cycling infrastructure globally tends to orbit lifestyle signaling, environmentalism, or urban design aesthetics. A large component of the Trailway’s proposal is through the lens of essential public health infrastructure.
The scale of the project also changes meaningfully when viewed through the lens of island geography. During our conversation, Gibbs and I discussed how a 38-kilometer trail in Barbados carries implications wildly disproportionate to what an equivalent project might represent in a larger country like the United States. In a continental nation, a trail of that length can feel regional or recreational. On a densely populated island measuring roughly 34 by 16 kilometers, it functions as national infrastructure.
Gibbs described the vision not as an isolated bike path, but as a transportation spine running through the center of the country, eventually supplemented by branch lines reaching outward toward surrounding communities. At full realization, very few places on the island would sit more than a few kilometers from the corridor. The result would be one of the highest concentrations of rail-to-trail infrastructure per square mile anywhere in the world. Small island nations compress systems in a distinct manner. Traffic congestion, public health, climate resilience, tourism, infrastructure investment, and cultural change all operate at heightened intensity because the scale of the territory itself amplifies consequences. A relatively modest intervention in physical terms can produce outsized systemic effects.
The project also exists within another defining reality of small island nations: diaspora. Gibbs repeatedly returned to the influence of Barbadians living abroad, particularly in cities like New York, London, and Toronto, where active mobility infrastructure and public space projects are now far more normalized.
“As many Barbadians live outside of Barbados as in Barbados at any given time,” he told me. That diaspora exerts influence economically, culturally, and politically. Barbadians abroad send money home, remain deeply engaged with the island, and retain voting rights if they maintain citizenship. More importantly, they return carrying different assumptions about how cities and public infrastructure can function. A Barbadian living in New York or London experiences projects like the High Line and encounters protected cycling infrastructure and public transit integration as ordinary parts of urban life. Those experiences reshape expectations.
“These might be novel concepts in Barbados,” Gibbs said, “but they’re not novel to a Barbadian living abroad.” In larger countries, diasporic influence can diffuse into abstraction. In small island states, it can materially alter political and cultural trajectories. The Trailway sits at the intersection of local history and imported imagination; a translation of global ideas through distinctly Barbadian geography and history.
The project’s early pilot phase has already demonstrated latent demand. Roughly two kilometers of trail have been completed using a concrete surface rather than asphalt, a decision that allowed smaller local contractors to participate incrementally in construction. The shift dramatically accelerated progress. Costs are currently estimated around $250,000 USD per kilometer.
Even before completion, the pilot section has become heavily used. “If you go there anytime after three or four o’clock, there’s probably 50, 60, 70 people just walking up and down those two kilometers,” Gibbs said. “Beyond that, there are people on rollerblades, kids on bikes, parents walking beside them. The organic use that is happening already with just such a small stretch is really encouraging.”
One of the most compelling aspects of public infrastructure projects is how quickly people begin adapting them toward uses planners never fully anticipated. Once safe public space exists, people find ways to occupy it. The Trailway also exposes the layered complexity of mobility culture. Barbados is intensely car-centric, but not simply because of status signaling. Cars embody practicality, privacy, and independence on an island where public transit remains inconsistent. Gibbs was careful not to reduce car ownership to vanity alone. The challenge, in his view, is not anti-car ideology, but offering viable alternatives.
That includes confronting climate realities directly. Barbados is hot. One of the most common objections to cycling is arriving at work sweaty. The project’s response has been holistic: the Trailway plans continuous rows of tropical fruit trees along both sides of the corridor, creating shade while also contributing to food resilience and public space. E-bikes are increasingly seen as part of the solution as well, lowering the physical threshold for participation while extending the practical range of daily trips.
There are cultural barriers too, particularly around gender. Gibbs estimates that while most Barbadian men know how to ride bicycles, female ridership may be as low as 15–20 percent. Safety concerns extend beyond traffic collisions to include harassment and personal security. The project has increasingly worked with women’s groups to incorporate those concerns into the design process itself. In mobility planning, female ridership is often one of the clearest indicators of uptake and the Trailway appears to understand this.
Economically, the project has implications beyond transportation. Caribbean economies frequently concentrate activity along coastlines, especially in tourism-driven regions. The Trailway pulls movement inward, potentially redistributing economic opportunity toward villages and agricultural areas in the island’s interior. Bike rentals, food vendors, repair shops, local tourism, and small businesses could emerge along the corridor organically.
Importantly, Gibbs resists framing this primarily as a tourism project. “One of the most radical things you can do in a tourism economy is actually build something great for the people that live there.” Across the Caribbean, overtourism creates a growing divide between visitor experience and local quality of life. The Trailway proposes infrastructure shared simultaneously by residents and visitors, hopefully producing an emergent authenticity.
The project is also notable for its transferability. Barbados possesses unusual advantages: relatively flat topography and a preserved rail corridor with limited encroachment. Many islands lack those conditions. But Gibbs argues the broader lesson is not necessarily rail-to-trail conversion itself, but the identification and activation of marginal public land: canal edges, road easements, buffer zones, utility corridors, abandoned infrastructure. Land acquisition, especially near coastlines, is often the single greatest barrier to active transportation infrastructure in island nations. Existing public corridors dramatically change the equation.
• • •
When I first learned of the Barbados Trailway Project, I thought about Eleuthera, one of the Bahamian Family Islands nearly 2,000 kilometers to the northwest and effectively a world away from the dynamism of Barbados. My family has found temporary escape from the New England winter to Eleuthera for most of my life. The island is roughly 177 kilometers long and rarely more than two kilometers wide. One road, the Queen’s Highway, runs nearly its entire length. The landscape possesses a timeless austere tropical beauty. Mobility is limited and often precarious. Cars move quickly along narrow roads with almost no dedicated infrastructure for anyone outside one, in juxtaposition with the tranquility and calm of the island otherwise.
For the past several years, I’ve found myself thinking increasingly about what a separated bikeway running alongside that road could do for Eleuthera. The idea itself is not entirely foreign. Small cycling events and organized group rides already make use of the Queen’s Highway during parts of the year. But permanent, dedicated bicycle infrastructure would represent something else entirely. Beyond the possibility for extraordinary recreational riding, it could provide meaningful transportation infrastructure: connecting settlements, creating safer movement for locals and visitors alike, and encouraging small-scale economic development tied to bicycle tourism and bikepacking. It could create reasons to stop inland rather than simply passing through by car.
My skepticism about such a possibility has never stemmed from the infrastructural requirements themselves, but rather from my understanding of the pace, bureaucracy, and structural inertia inherent in development across the Bahamas, particularly the Out Islands.
On my last trip to Eleuthera, I pull off the Queen's Highway to stop at a newly built liquor store near our road. I recognize the owner immediately. His previous shop, smaller and less centrally located, had been a regular post-dinner drive for years.
The air conditioning blasted. Above the door, a television streamed a Caribbean gospel service to speakers throughout the aisles.
"New spot, huh? It looks great."
"Are you a local?"
"No, but my family has been coming here for years."
"Then you're a local."
"You'd recognize my dad."
"Jonathan."
Even after decades of visiting, it is difficult to know what's new on the island. The Queen's Highway stretches for nearly its entire length, but signage is sparse and businesses often reveal themselves only if you already know where to look. New restaurants, stores, and services materialize slowly and quietly. You hear about them from a friend, notice a fresh roofline through the trees, or happen to have the luck to catch a small sign while driving past at forty miles per hour.
Yet the changes are there. Development on the island ebbs and flows in cycles shaped mostly by storms. Eleuthera now feels noticeably on an upswing. New stores. New homes. New hospitality projects. New investment. Opportunity is emerging, but so too is the challenge of connecting people to it.
I grabbed a six-pack and jumped back in my car.
• • •
While geographically and culturally distinct, the Barbados Trailway makes this imagined possibility feel more tangible to me. What makes the project compelling is not merely that it proposes a bike path, but that it proposes a different relationship between land, movement, health, and public life on a small island increasingly constrained by the consequences of car dependency. The Trailway reframes infrastructure not simply as an engineering problem, but as a cultural and historical one.
Toward the end of our conversation, Gibbs told me, “The Trailway will truly be successful when we can see a grandmother using it at dusk.” His image distilled the project into something both practical and human: safety, comfort, access, public trust, intergenerational use. A piece of infrastructure fully absorbed into daily life.
Barney Gibbs is Director and Lead of the Barbados Trailway Project at the Future Centre Trust, a Barbados-based sustainability organization, where he leads the Barbados Trailway Project. He is the founder of Antilles Outdoor, a solar-powered transit advertising business operating across the Eastern Caribbean. Barney lives in Barbados with his wife and four children and has been paddleboarding, cycling, and advocating for active transport across the Caribbean for longer than he cares to admit.
Written by Chessin Gertler in conversation with Barney Gibbs | Media provided by Ryan Nash, a social impact oriented visual storyteller with Barbadian ties