On the morning of July 6, city officials and a knot of neighbors gathered at 1720 E. 58th Street for a ribbon-cutting most trail regulars had been waiting years for. It didn't look like much: a stretch of new concrete path, a timber bridge over a drainage ditch, a protected crossing over Truman Parkway at 52nd Street. But it closed a gap that had forced Daffin Park area walkers and cyclists onto surface streets for nearly six years, and it turned two disconnected trail segments into one.
If you've ridden the Truman Linear Park Trail before, you know the frustration this fixes. If you haven't, here's what changed and why it matters more than the ribbon-cutting photo suggests.
Two Trails Pretending to Be One
The confusion around this trail has always been that people talk about it as a single thing when for the better part of six years it was really two things with a hole in the middle. The first piece, often called the Police Memorial Trail, sits up near Daffin Park. The second piece, a 3.1-mile stretch running from DeRenne Avenue down to Lake Mayer Park, opened back in November 2020. Between them was a gap that started at 52nd Street and Bee Road and ran to East DeRenne Avenue, a stretch where the only option was city streets and whatever traffic happened to be on them that day.
That gap is what closed on July 6. The new segment, which the city calls Phase 2B, is a 10-foot-wide concrete path with a timber bridge crossing a drainage ditch and an 8-foot-wide protected, shared-use path across the 52nd Street bridge over Truman Parkway. City Council approved the construction contract back in February 2024, and Mayor Van Johnson, City Manager Jay Melder, and District 3 Alderwoman Linda Wilder Bryan were slated to join the ribbon-cutting alongside project partners.
Here's the shape of it now:
| Segment | Route | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 (Police Memorial Trail) | Near Daffin Park | Existing |
| Phase 2A (original Truman Linear Trail) | DeRenne Avenue to Lake Mayer Park, 3.1 miles | Opened November 2020 |
| Phase 2B (new connector) | 52nd Street & Bee Road to East DeRenne Avenue | Ribbon-cut July 6, 2026 |
Put together, that's roughly seven continuous off-road miles from the Police Memorial Trail down to Lake Mayer Park. Add the loop around Daffin Park itself and the loop around Lake Mayer, and the connected pathway runs closer to nine miles, all of it walkable or bikeable without touching a car lane.
What You're Actually Riding
The completed stretch between DeRenne Avenue and Lake Mayer Park is ADA accessible, with a wide concrete surface, lighting, security cameras, and emergency call boxes spaced along the route, and Phase 2B was built to the same standard. That matters more once you understand what this trail was originally built to solve. It's not framed by the city as a recreational amenity first. Georgia ranks as the sixth most dangerous state in the country for pedestrians, and Savannah is one of the more dangerous cities within the state for crashes between drivers and people walking or biking. The Truman Trail, and the broader Tide to Town system it belongs to, exists to give people a way to get to work, school, or a doctor's appointment without sharing a lane with cars.
That said, the trail isn't flawless. Some riders on the original DeRenne-to-Lake Mayer stretch have flagged dim patches after dusk despite the lighting, which is worth knowing if you're planning an evening ride rather than a midday one.
Along the way, the trail passes the Scarborough Sports Complex before reaching the loop around Lake Mayer, and if you're riding the Daffin Park end and want a reason to turn it into an outing rather than just a workout, Cohen's Retreat sits just off the path at 5715 Skidaway Road. It's the kind of stop that turns a there-and-back ride into an actual destination, which is precisely the point of building trails people want to use rather than just trails that exist.
The Bigger Map This Fits Into
The Truman Trail is the spine of something much larger. Tide to Town, the city's full urban trail vision, is a planned 30-mile core route that when finished will connect 62 neighborhoods, 30 schools, and three major hospitals across Savannah and Chatham County. The Truman segment closing this summer is the first piece of that vision to reach full connectivity, and it's been a long road to get here. At the 2024 groundbreaking for this same phase, Paula Kreissler, Healthy Savannah's executive director and Tide to Town's vice chair, said the finished network "will link 75 percent of Savannah's neighborhoods to safe walking and biking infrastructure."
The funding behind that push is worth knowing too. In 2023, the Georgia General Assembly approved a 2 percent increase to Savannah's hotel and motel tax, and the city used the resulting revenue to secure a $10 million allocation for Tide to Town that same year. City officials called it the largest single commitment to non-motorized mobility in Savannah's history, and it's what turned Phase 2B from a plan on paper into concrete and a bridge deck.
The next piece already has a name: a route along Middleground Road, running from Georgia Southern University's Armstrong Campus to Montgomery Cross Road, is currently in design. Two additional sections are in the planning phase beyond that, with longer-term ambitions to eventually link toward the historic downtown core, the Canal District, and points further out in the county. None of that is finished, and dates for those later segments haven't been set. But the pattern is clear: each piece that opens makes the next one more likely to actually get built, because it gives the city proof that people use what it constructs.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
If your daily loop touches Daffin Park, DeRenne Avenue, or the streets around Bee Road and 52nd Street, this summer is the first time in years that a full off-road route to Lake Mayer has actually existed rather than existed on a master plan document. That's a real change to how a Tuesday evening or a Saturday morning can look, not a hypothetical one. Where you used to have to choose between the sidewalk on Bee Road or driving to the trailhead at Lake Mayer, you can now start from either end and ride the whole thing without stopping for a light.
It's also a useful reminder that the version of Savannah you're picturing from a few years ago is quietly out of date. Infrastructure like this changes slowly and then all at once, and the people who notice first are usually the ones already living near it.
For a broader look at how Savannah's parks and green spaces fit together, our guide to outdoor life in Savannah rounds out the picture beyond just this one corridor.
Homes by TLC keeps an eye on changes like this because they shape what it actually feels like to live in a given pocket of Savannah, not because we're trying to sell you on anything today. If you're curious what a stretch near the Savannah neighborhoods we work in is worth now that the trail map looks different, our free home valuation tool is there whenever you want to look.
