This weblog follows the success story of how Strolling Faculty Fellow Armand Turner and Wholesome Savannah secured $4 million in funding by the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act to help the development of Savannah, Georgia’s Tide to City Path.
Armand Turner is initially from Gary, Indiana. After school at Indiana State College, he left for jobs in Denver, Colorado; Dallas/Fort Price, Texas; and Albany, Georgia. He moved to Savannah, Georgia after his spouse, an engineer, accepted a job within the historic southern metropolis.
Turner started working because the bodily exercise program supervisor at Wholesome Savannah, the place he centered on encouraging native residents to stroll and bike extra. He turned govt director of the group in January 2025.
In 2019, the YMCA of Coastal Georgia obtained a Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Group Well being (REACH) grant from the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention. They collaborated with Wholesome Savannah to assist enhance the well being of individuals in Chatham County, together with rising bodily exercise. That is how Turner received concerned within the Tide to City undertaking, an thought already many years within the making, to make Savannah extra walk- and bike-friendly.
The Tide to City Path is a community of strolling and biking amenities connecting Savannah and Chatham County that may finally span 30-plus miles, connecting 62 neighborhoods, 30 colleges, three hospitals, and industrial facilities by a mix of on-street and separated paths. The undertaking’s title was steered by John Bennett, a professor at Savannah State College, who needed it to “characterize what Savannah was to many individuals,” from the city a part of town to its waterways.
Turner began attending conferences on the undertaking early on in his tenure with Wholesome Savannah and noticed it as an ideal match for the group’s objectives. A yr later, as a 2020 America Walks Strolling Faculty fellow, Turner made the undertaking the topic of his strolling motion plan, declaring within the opening paragraph that “5 years from now, Savannah will likely be a metropolis related by strolling and biking trails.”
As of 2025, two segments of Tide to City have been accomplished alongside Truman Parkway. A 3rd is anticipated to be completed within the coming yr, bringing the system to a complete of seven steady miles.
Turner is fast to credit score the many individuals and teams concerned within the undertaking’s successes, together with the Tide to City nonprofit fashioned in 2018. However he and his group have been vital in constructing help for the undertaking locally and past, thanks largely to the REACH grant that funded neighborhood engagement. “These first 5 years of REACH, we went into the neighborhoods alongside the route and talked to neighborhood members about obstacles, how this might assist connectivity,” Turner shared.
It truly is superb. Typically it’s surreal to exit to that portion that’s being constructed proper now. The work that so many individuals have come collectively to make occur … It’s like, ‘What’s subsequent?’
– Armand Turner, Government Director of Wholesome Savannah and America Walks Strolling Faculty Fellow
When requested how the neighborhood feels concerning the undertaking, Turner stated, “Most individuals are on board. They like the concept of higher sidewalks, higher strolling infrastructure of their neighborhoods.” There are some, he added, who surprise why these kind of amenities are a precedence in neighborhoods with so many different urgent wants. The shortage of entry to grocery shops has been one such precedence recognized by residents alongside some sections of the proposed path.
Turner’s response is all the time, “‘Why not each?’ We are able to work on each of these points on the similar time.”
One of the thrilling modifications within the 5 years since Turner joined the Strolling Faculty is the rising settlement on the necessity for the Tide to Path undertaking. “I believe the largest change from 5 years in the past with this work is the buy-in that we’ve obtained from town. We’ve gone from a place the place we had been making an attempt to persuade town that that is vital [to one in which] they’re purchased in.”
Just a few years in the past, Turner and others took representatives from Georgia’s two senators’ workplaces on a motorbike trip across the metropolis, demonstrating the undertaking’s potential. “They had been all for it,” Turner stated of the representatives of senators Jon Ossoff’s and Raphael Warnock’s workplaces. “It’s one factor to have a look at the web site [and another to] actually see how logical it’s to construct trails right here.”
Turner can’t make sure that it was the trip that made the distinction in getting the undertaking funding by the Infrastructure Invoice, but it surely couldn’t have damage. “I believe it’s all only one further piece that weighed into that remaining choice,” he stated.
Requested what it was wish to have the possibility to make use of amenities that had been solely conceptual when he first moved to Savannah and to expertise the yields of his and others’ laborious work first-hand, Turner stated, “It truly is superb. Typically it’s surreal to exit to that portion that’s being constructed proper now. The work that so many individuals have come collectively to make occur … It’s like, ‘What’s subsequent?’”
This publication was made doable by the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention (CDC) (Contract #47QRAA20D003W). Its contents are solely the duty of the authors and don’t essentially characterize the official views of CDC. These efforts are a part of the CDC’s Energetic Individuals, Wholesome NationSM Initiative that’s working to assist 27 million People turn into extra bodily energetic by 2027.
