Brad and Bridget Maybank live near downtown Bonita, and on August 18 they walked into their polling place and voted yes on a $35 million bond most of their neighbors had been arguing about for months. The measure passed with about 68 percent support, 8,968 votes to 4,175. For the Maybanks and the thousands of other yes voters, the win felt like the finish line. It is not. It is closer to the starting gun.
The bond funds Bonita Springs' share of buying an 11.4-mile stretch of unused railroad corridor that will eventually become the Bonita Estero Rail Trail, known locally as BERT. What the vote did not do is put a single foot of pavement on the ground. The rails are still bolted into the corridor as you read this. Understanding the gap between "funded" and "walkable" tells you more about what actually changes in Bonita Springs over the next several years than the headline vote ever will.
What the Money Actually Buys
The $35 million bond covers Bonita Springs' portion of a three-way land purchase. Bonita, the Village of Estero, and Collier County are each buying the stretch of corridor that runs through their own jurisdiction, and the price tag scales with more than just mileage.
Bonita Springs is paying about $28.5 million for 5.8 miles. Estero is paying $19.8 million for 4.1 miles. Collier County is paying $11.6 million for 1.5 miles. Do the arithmetic and Collier is paying roughly $7.7 million per mile, while Bonita and Estero are each paying closer to $4.9 million per mile. The Trust for Public Land, which brokered the deal, says the split reflects each segment's appraised market value rather than a flat per-mile rate. Land near the Collier end, close to Wiggins Pass Road, is simply worth more on paper than the industrial and right-of-way parcels further north.
That detail matters if you live along the corridor, because it tells you the trail is not being built as a single uniform project. It is three separate acquisitions, three separate budgets, and three separate timelines that happen to line up into one continuous path on a map.
The Calendar Between Now and Pavement
Here is the sequence that has to happen before anyone can walk, run, or bike the corridor.
- October 2026: The target date to formally close on the land purchase. Trust for Public Land negotiated this deadline down from an earlier March 2026 target after the total price dropped from $70.4 million to $60 million.
- Up to two years after closing: Seminole Gulf Railway, which has owned the line since acquiring it from CSX Transportation in 1987, has up to two years to vacate the corridor and physically remove the existing tracks. Freight service on the line already ended back in 2008, but the rails themselves are still legally the railway's property until this process runs its course.
- Two to three years out: Local governments have said construction is targeted to begin roughly two to three years from now, with a projected 12 to 24 month build once it starts.
Stack those windows on top of each other and the honest answer to "when can I use this trail" is sometime in the early 2030s, not next season. That is a very different picture than the one implied by the celebratory tone around the August vote, and it is worth knowing before you plan a Saturday around it.
Why the Rails Haven't Moved Yet
There is a procedural reason the tracks are still there, and it is not simply bureaucratic slowness. Before Seminole Gulf Railway can hand the corridor over for trail use, it has to formally abandon the line through the federal Surface Transportation Board. According to the railway's own filing, the segment runs from the Estero Parkway right-of-way boundary south through Bonita Springs and into Collier County, ending near the conceptual extension of Wiggins Pass Road. The railway has stated in that filing that it understands local interest exists in converting the line to a trail and intends to transfer the property for that purpose once the abandonment process clears.
That federal step, not local politics, is the reason "the rails are still there" is a fact rather than a complaint. The bond money pays for land. It does not accelerate a federal docket.
The People Steering This
Friends of BERT started as an all-volunteer advocacy group in September 2022 and has grown to more than 4,000 members. Deb Orton, the group's founder, has been blunt about why she got involved. "Most of us are cyclists quite honestly," she said after the February 2026 corridor agreement was announced. "And we live in one of the most dangerous places in the country for cyclists. So for us, we got into this because we wanted a safe place to walk and to ride a bike."
That safety argument is not rhetorical flourish. Lee County recorded more than 1,200 bicycle and pedestrian crashes between 2021 and 2022, resulting in 71 fatalities, according to figures the advocacy group has cited in its public materials. Chris Magnus, who owns Rooftop at Riverside in downtown Bonita, made the safety case directly to voters ahead of the August referendum, calling it "now or never" and describing a future where residents can "walk, bike, roller-skate" without competing with car traffic on Old 41 or Bonita Beach Road.
On election night, BERT chairperson Beth Castro described the mood at the watch party as "ecstatic," noting the margin made clear "the people want this trail." Doug Hattaway of the Trust for Public Land struck a more measured tone about what comes next, saying the hardest part is done and now comes the work of designing a corridor that reflects the character of the communities it runs through.
What Changes for You This Year, and What Doesn't
If you live within a 10-minute walk or bike ride of the corridor, you are one of roughly 70,000 residents the Trust for Public Land counts in that radius. Practically speaking, almost nothing changes for you in 2026 or 2027. Traffic patterns on Old 41, Bonita Beach Road, and the surrounding neighborhood streets stay the same. The tracks stay in the ground through the track removal window. Construction has not been scheduled.
What is worth watching is the sequence of public milestones rather than the finished trail itself. The October 2026 closing is the next real checkpoint. After that, track removal becomes the visible sign of progress, since a corridor with rails pulled out looks fundamentally different from one still carrying old ties and steel. A conceptual rendering already circulating shows an expanded Riverside Park serving as a downtown trailhead, which gives you a sense of where the Bonita end of the corridor is headed even before ground is broken.
In the meantime, Riverside Park remains the city's actual gathering ground for outdoor time, hosting the farmers market, the concert band, and the seasonal festivals that already define downtown's rhythm. The rail trail, when it eventually opens, is planned to link that same downtown core north through Estero and toward Coconut Point, connecting neighborhoods, employment centers, and commercial districts along the way. That is the long-term vision. For now, it is still a vision with a purchase agreement attached to it, not a place you can walk your dog after dinner.
The vote was a genuine milestone. It resolved the funding question that had stalled the project for years and gave Trust for Public Land the leverage to finalize a purchase price with Seminole Gulf Railway. What it did not do is compress a federal abandonment process, a two-year track removal window, or a multi-year construction timeline into something that happens before your kids finish middle school. Knowing that difference is the actual local knowledge worth having this fall, more useful than any rendering of a future trailhead.
If you're weighing what a home near this corridor means for your daily life now versus five years from now, or you're comparing Bonita Springs to other Southwest Florida communities while this kind of infrastructure takes shape, KW Elevate Luxury can walk you through what's actually confirmed, what's still projected, and what it means for the neighborhood you're considering. Contact us.
