For most of the last decade, the stretch of College Parkway that runs through the middle of the Broadneck peninsula has meant one thing to anyone driving it: orange barrels, a lane shift, and a paved shoulder that stopped for no obvious reason a quarter mile later. That changed on March 30, 2026, when Anne Arundel County held a ribbon cutting for the final three segments of the Broadneck Peninsula Trail, phases 1B, 3, and 5, closing the last gaps in a route that now runs, uninterrupted, from the B&A Trail all the way to Sandy Point State Park. County Executive Steuart Pittman, Recreation and Parks Director Jessica Leys, Public Works Director Karen Henry, Councilwoman Amanda Fiedler, BikeAAA president Jon Korin, and Jack Keene of the Friends of Anne Arundel County Trails all showed up to mark the occasion, which tells you something about how long this had been on the county's to-do list.
If you live in St. Margaret's and haven't been paying attention to trail construction schedules, that's fair. Most people don't. But the finish line matters here in a way that generic trail news usually doesn't, because this particular project has been "almost done" for so long that treating it as still unfinished has become a reasonable default assumption. It no longer is.
Twenty-Seven Years From First Line Item To Ribbon Cutting
The Broadneck Trail first appeared in county capital budget documents in the late 1990s. By 2003, the initial cost estimate sat at $6.3 million. By the time the county cut the ribbon this spring, the completed project had grown to $17.5 million. That's not a rounding error, it's a nearly threefold increase over more than two decades of design revisions, phased funding, and construction that moved in fits and starts as budgets allowed.
The build-out happened in pieces most residents never tracked as a single project. Phase I, from Green Holly Drive to Cape St. Claire Road, finished around 2013. Phase II, connecting Bay Dale Drive to Green Holly Drive, came a few years after that. Phase III, linking Peninsula Farm Road to Bay Dale Drive, ran into the kind of grading and tree-clearing pushback that led the county to redesign later sections with boardwalks instead of major earthwork. The final pieces, phases 1B and 5, carried the trail from its earlier terminus the rest of the way into Sandy Point State Park. Each phase had its own contractor, its own community meeting, its own delay. Put together, they add up to a roughly 8-mile paved corridor that now runs the length of the peninsula without a break.
What Actually Changed This Spring
The practical difference between March 29 and March 30 of this year is that a resident on a bike can now ride from the B&A Trail's connection point at Jones Station Road all the way to the entrance of Sandy Point State Park without touching a road shoulder. Along the way, the trail passes Anne Arundel Community College, the Broadneck Library, Broadneck Park, and Bay Head Park, with additional links to retail and dining clustered near Bay Dale Drive and Cape St. Claire.
None of this happened by accident or entirely through government funding. Ed Parker, a longtime Broadneck resident who has been involved with the trail's advocacy for years, personally funded a rest stop near the Broadneck Library that includes a bench, a picnic table, a bike rack, a water fountain, and a hose for pets. It's a small detail, but it's the kind of thing that shows up when a project takes long enough that private citizens start filling gaps the budget cycle can't move fast enough to cover.
Worth knowing if you're a B&A Trail regular: that trail's own southern terminus sits several miles away at Jonas Green Park on the Severn River, near the Naval Academy Bridge. The Broadneck connection happens further up the line, at Jones Station Road, not at Jonas Green itself. If you've always assumed the two trails met at the water, they don't.
The Part St. Margaret's Residents Should Know Before They Get Excited
Here's where the honest version of this story diverges from the celebratory one. The Broadneck Trail's spine runs along College Parkway, which is the road that threads through the center of the peninsula, past Broadneck High School, the library, and AACC. St. Margaret's, with its neighborhoods clustered along St. Margarets Road and Pleasant Plains Road toward Whitehall Creek and Mill Creek, sits off to the side of that corridor, not on it.
That means the trail doesn't run through St. Margaret's the way it runs through, say, Cape St. Claire, where it functions as a literal spur along the main road. If you live off Pleasant Plains Road, reaching the trail means driving or riding out to Bay Dale Drive or College Parkway first, the same way you'd already get to Route 50. It's a genuine amenity for the peninsula, and it changes what's reachable without a car once you're on it, but it's not a straight shot from your driveway. Anyone telling you the trail runs through St. Margaret's proper is describing a peninsula-wide project a little too generously.
What You Can Actually Reach Without Starting The Car
Once you're on the trail, though, the list of destinations without a car key is longer than it's ever been:
- Anne Arundel Community College
- Broadneck Library
- Broadneck Park and Bay Head Park
- Retail and dining along Bay Dale Drive and in Cape St. Claire
- Sandy Point State Park, for the first time as a continuous ride rather than a drive
For a household with a teenager who can now bike to community college classes, or a retiree who wants to ride to the library on a Tuesday morning instead of moving the car twice, that's not a small thing. It's also the kind of change that takes a year or two to show up in daily habits, because most people don't reroute their routines the week a ribbon gets cut.
The Places That Were Already Yours
None of this touches the parts of St. Margaret's that have nothing to do with a trail. Cantler's Riverside Inn, tucked at the end of Forest Beach Road on Mill Creek, has been serving steamed crabs at picnic tables since Jimmy and Linda Cantler opened it in 1974. It's the kind of place people describe as being for locals first, visitors second, mostly because there's no way to stumble onto it. You either know the turn off Forest Beach Road or you don't.
St. Margaret's Episcopal Church, at 1601 Pleasant Plains Road, has an even longer history. The parish was established as Broade Necke Parish in 1692, making it one of the oldest continuously operating congregations in the country, and its current clapboard sanctuary is the fifth building the congregation has worshipped in since then. Neither Cantler's nor the church needed a county capital project to matter to the neighborhood. They were here before College Parkway had a name, and they'll be here regardless of how many trail phases get funded next.
That contrast is the actual story. A twenty-seven-year infrastructure project just reached its finish line, and it's worth knowing about if you bike, walk a dog, or want an alternative to Route 50 traffic on a Saturday. But it sits alongside a neighborhood whose real anchors, a waterman's crab house and a 300-year-old parish, were never waiting on a ribbon cutting to matter. Knowing which is which, and knowing exactly how far the new trail actually reaches into your particular corner of the peninsula, is the difference between using it and just hearing about it.
If you're weighing a move to St. Margaret's or trying to understand how a specific street relates to the water, the schools, or a project like this one, Brian Jacobs has spent years walking these roads and knows exactly where the pavement changes and what that means for the way you'll actually live here. Reach out for a conversation grounded in the neighborhood as it exists today, not as a brochure describes it.
