Master-planned communities often sell lifestyle through amenities: shaded walking paths, lake trails, playgrounds and safe routes for children to ride bikes. Cities were not built with those features in mind, but they can still be retrofitted for modern life. That is the larger idea behind the SUN Trail now moving through St. Johns County to create a more connected, active and livable community.
Officially, SUN stands for Shared-Use Nonmotorized Trail. In St. Johns County, the project represents more than a trail. It is a long-planned public amenity that gives residents another way to move through their community, connecting people to the places they already want to go, without needing their car.
The concept dates back to 1991 when 1000 Friends of Florida and The Conservation Fund drafted a proposal to create an interconnected network of “green infrastructure” spanning the state. In St. Johns County, the earliest local success came with the construction of the Palatka-to-St. Augustine Trail.
Heather Lane Neville of W.E. Are Planning, says she “has worked on the project for nearly two decades.” Neville became involved first as an advocate and later through both volunteer and professional roles, working with the Florida Greenways and Trails Board during the push to establish state funding. But beyond funding, the project needed planning, alignments, engineering and local government support which she passionately spearheaded.
St. Johns County Engineer Duane Kent confirmed in 2008, the Board of County Commissioners entered into a memorandum of understanding with Volusia, Flagler, Brevard, and Putnam counties and the Florida Department of Transportation to begin coordinating to link their individual local paths into one massive loop.
FUNDING THE PROJECT
To make the vision a reality, advocates and lawmakers knew a dedicated funding source would be essential to fill in the gaps between existing fragmented, local trails so riders and hikers could safely cross counties away from highway traffic. In 2015, the Legislature passed a bill formally establishing the SUN Trail Network, financed through the redistribution of new motor vehicle tag revenues, now providing $50 million annually to the project.
Building the trail from Palatka to St. Augustine was the easy part. Kent explains “that portion followed an old railroad corridor acquired by the state.” The more complicated work was determining how to bring the trail through St. Johns County, into St. Augustine, across to the beach and ultimately south toward Flagler County.
In 2017, the county entered into an agreement with FDOT to fund a planning study for the project. That study examined how the trail should move from the river side of the county toward the Atlantic and down the coast. Out of that process came the proposed alignments and local approvals needed to move the project forward. During that study, every possible route was considered for ease of use and safety. Ultimately A1A Beach Boulevard was chosen because it is the easternmost road through that part of St. Augustine Beach, closest to the ocean and the places people are trying to reach. “In 2019, the City of St. Augustine, City of St. Augustine Beach and St. Johns County all agreed with the planning study and said yes, this is the preferred alignment and this is what we’d like to see,” Kent said.
Then came one of the project’s major turning points. Neville wrote 13 grant applications for the St. Johns County SUN Trail segments in St. Johns County and at the end of 2022, Neville received a call notifying her that all 13 grants had been fully funded. For a project that had been years in the making, it was the moment that moved the trail from aspiration to reality. Neville describes it as roughly $45 million in infrastructure coming back to the community, with local governments accepting maintenance responsibility for an asset similar in upkeep to a sidewalk.
The funding comes from the state and is dedicated to trail development. The money is tied to this use, meaning it cannot simply be redirected to unrelated local needs. The SUN Trail is not being funded as a city or county wish-list item or a one-off beautification project. It is part of a state-supported trail network intended to improve mobility, safety, recreation, tourism and quality of life across Florida.
Danielle Anderson, Program Administrator for Friends of A1A Scenic & Historic Coastal Byway, explains the trail and the byway naturally work together. The A1A Scenic & Historic Coastal Byway runs through St. Johns and Flagler counties and has earned All-American Road designation, a top-tier federal scenic byway recognition. Anderson said the River-to-Sea Loop follows the same logic as the byway: it should connect people to the scenic, cultural and commercial places they actually want to experience.
In St. Johns County, the planned SUN Trail includes nearly 40 miles of the regional loop. The county’s segments include connections from Vermont Boulevard to CR 214; Allen Nease Road to Prairie Lakes Drive, including a planned pedestrian bridge; Prairie Lakes Drive to Holmes Boulevard; West King Street from Holmes Boulevard to U.S. 1; and Pope Road to A1A Beach Boulevard.
Kent said the county has construction funding for several inland portions, including Vermont Heights, Allen Nease Road, CR 214 and King Street. Other portions are being handled through different jurisdictions. The City of St. Augustine is still working through planning for its portion, while FDOT is handling state road segments, including the stretch from around the lighthouse to SR 312 and the continuation south toward Flagler County.
The A1A Beach Boulevard portion owned by the county is currently further along in design because of a tighter grant deadline. Kent said the county submitted its 100% design to FDOT for final review, with the design grant due June 30. The county has design money for that portion and expects construction funding in the next fiscal year.
That Beach Boulevard segment has drawn the most public attention because it is the part of the trail many residents can most easily picture. The proposed design would replace the existing narrow sidewalk on the east side of A1A Beach Boulevard with a 10-foot shared-use path. The west-side sidewalk would remain. The project is also expected to include a curb, grass separation, ADA improvements, driveway and sidewalk reconnections, signal modifications, signage, milling and new pavement markings.
For County Commissioner Ann Taylor, whose District 5 includes St. Augustine Beach, the project is ultimately about safety and lifestyle. “What is there now is not ideal,” Taylor said. “Sometimes only one or two people can even fit on that sidewalk.” She described seeing bicyclists leaving the pier and trying to reach nearby businesses while sharing a narrow sidewalk with pedestrians because the existing shoulder does not function as a true bike lane for that kind of trip. For Taylor, the proposed shared-use path is intended to improve that condition. “My hope is that once it’s there, residents realize that it actually is going to improve safety, not diminish it,” she said.
VISION FOR USE
A trail like this is not only for serious cyclists. It is for walkers, runners, parents with strollers, children on bikes, older adults, visitors, workers and residents who want the option to move through their community without getting into a car for every short trip.
It creates something to do that does not require a ticket, a reservation or a parking space. Anderson describes the value in simple terms of health, safety and accessibility. “A wider multi-use path gives people more room than a traditional sidewalk and creates a more comfortable space for different users. Instead of squeezing past one another on a narrow sidewalk or stepping into the grass to let someone pass, residents and visitors gain a dedicated corridor designed for shared use,” explains Anderson.
Kent believes the people most likely to use the trail are not long-distance cyclists traveling the full 260-mile loop. They are local residents. “The road bike rider, the warrior that’s going to do the 250-mile loop, there certainly are going to be some of those,” Kent said. “But the vast majority of riders are going to be local.”
The idea is not new. While researching transportation history on Anastasia Island, Gary Testa discovered that in 1887 the Anastasia Island Horse Railroad was established to connect St. Augustine to the beaches of Anastasia Island. The horse-drawn railroad crossed the marsh and carried visitors south toward many of the same destinations people enjoy today, including the lighthouse area and the beaches. The proposed St. Augustine Beach segment of the SUN Trail closely follows a historic transportation corridor that existed nearly 140 years ago.
For decades, much of St. Johns County’s growth has been built around the car. Neighborhoods, schools, shopping centers and beach destinations often require residents to drive from one place to the next, even when the distance is short. Trails help change that pattern by giving people a safe and visible way to move between destinations.
Kent said retrofitting this kind of amenity into an older environment is not simple, especially in a community as historic and constrained as St. Augustine and its surrounding beach neighborhoods. “We’re trying to retrofit into the nation’s oldest city,” Kent said. “It certainly is a challenge, but we work to overcome those challenges with good engineering, good science.”
That retrofit is what makes the SUN Trail so relevant to the county’s future. It is the kind of amenity residents often admire in other Florida communities: a connected public path that makes everyday life feel more accessible. Winter Garden, Pinellas County, Flagler Beach, Ormond Beach and other communities have shown how multi-use trails can become part of a place’s identity. They serve residents first, but they also support local businesses and tourism by making it easier for people to explore without relying entirely on a vehicle.
At the May 19, 2026 SJC Board of County Commissioners Meeting, State Rep. Cindy Stevenson urged commissioners to view the SUN Trail as a long-awaited transportation and quality-of-life investment, saying trail projects often face early opposition but can become beloved community assets once built. She emphasized though “I don’t want people to think this money will be around in five years when people clear up their vision.”
The timing is significant Neville agrees. When she first began working on trail advocacy, projects like this could cost between $300,000 and $500,000 per mile. Today, construction costs for transportation facilities such as sidewalks, curbing and trails can approach $3 million per mile. The longer communities wait to build these amenities, the more expensive they become.
That makes the current funding especially important. St. Johns County is receiving a major public asset that would be nearly impossible to build from scratch with local dollars alone.
As of 2026, the trail is funded in major segments, the alignment has been studied and adopted, and design work is moving forward. Once design is completed, construction will move through the standard public contracting process, with responsibility depending on the roadway jurisdiction. State road segments are handled through the state. County road segments are handled by the county. City road segments involve the city. Regional trail systems are built segment by segment, connection by connection, but each completed piece makes the larger loop more useful.
Neville says “the project is the result of many hands over many years, including early trail advocates, the St. Johns River-to-Sea Loop Alliance, Bike St. Augustine, Velo Fest, Friends of A1A, the North Florida Bicycle Club, county and city staff, elected boards, FDOT representatives, residents who participated in public meetings and behind the scenes work to bring it all together.”
After nearly 20 years of advocacy and planning, the SUN Trail is no longer just a line on a map. It is a major investment in how the county functions and how residents experience the place they call home proving not every amenity has to be built behind the gates of a new neighborhood.
