Aboite builds its own: a death on Arcola Road and sixteen years of phases

2001 - 2025

The founding: The southwest side of the county built its trail system the way the consortium had built the river one, as citizens first. Aboite New Trails, Inc. was created in December 2001. Input Fort Wayne's reporting gives the founding its human cause: when a vehicle struck and killed cyclist Ronald Repka along rural Arcola Road in 2001, residents in Aboite took action, and the organization they formed pushed for safer options for cyclists and pedestrians in a township of fast roads, big lots and no sidewalks.

The build-out: The Aboite group raised its own money first and built in pieces. By the summer of 2010 it counted 14.5 miles of Aboite Trails, with a privately funded mile of trail and boardwalk then under construction along Homestead Road, to be accepted by the City of Fort Wayne for ownership, maintenance and liability on completion: the Aboite pattern in one project, donors build, the city takes over. The Story of Fort Wayne section it was building toward was the Towpath connection in the previous article, which made the southwest's separate miles into part of one continuous corridor across the city.

The Covington Road Trail: The fullest measure of the pattern is the Covington Road Trail, 4.7 miles across the township's east-west grain. It was constructed by the City of Fort Wayne and the Indiana Department of Transportation from 2009 to 2025, in eight phases, sixteen years end to end. In 2006 Aboite New Trails secured a federal Transportation Enhancement grant of $987,172 for it; engineering began in 2007; the first phase, Scott Road to Ladue Lane, was built in 2009; the trail was carried over Interstate 69 to Hadley Road in 2013; and the phase from West Hamilton Road to the Beal-Taylor Ditch was completed in 2016. The whole came to nearly $8 million: $4.2 million federal, $3.2 million from the city, and $483,235 in donor funds provided by Aboite New Trails and Fort Wayne Trails. The city's Public Works Division announced the trail's completion in November 2025, counting it within 28.8 miles of existing trails in the Aboite Trails network; the city's Rivergreenway page describes the Aboite Trails, in November 2026, as more than 28 miles in southwest Fort Wayne, with trailhead parking at the Towpath Trailhead on Engle Road and at Indian Trails Park.

The standing: Aboite is the proof that the Fort Wayne trail system was never one project. It is three local movements, river, northwest and southwest, that learned to act as one, and the southwest movement is the one born from a death on a road with no shoulder. Its miles are the newest of the three founding systems and, on the city's count, the largest single named network in the county after the Rivergreenway itself.

Sources:

1. Input Fort Wayne, "Fort Wayne Trails: A merger that changed how the city moves," 27 February 2026 (Ronald Repka, Arcola Road, 2001).
2. The Waynedale News, 4 June 2010 (Aboite New Trails created December 2001; the 14.5 miles; the Homestead Road mile).
3. City of Fort Wayne news release, completion of the Covington Road Trail, November 2025 (the eight phases of 2009 to 2025, the grant of 2006, the costs, the 28.8 Aboite miles).
4. City of Fort Wayne, Rivergreenway page, as read November 2026 (the Aboite Trails at more than 28 miles; the trailheads).