"We live in one of the most beautiful places in the country in my opinion, the weather is beautiful." That's Justin Carter, the City of Wilmington's Director of Design and Construction, talking about why the Greenville Loop Trail matters. It's a nice line, but it undersells what's actually happening on the ground right now between South College Road and Park Avenue.
If you drive Greenville Loop Road to drop kids at Bradley Creek Elementary, you've probably noticed the new signal going in out front. It's easy to read that as a standalone fix, one more traffic light aimed at a chaotic school pickup line. It isn't. That signal is one visible piece of a four-phase, decade-plus infrastructure project that is now closer to its finish line than most people driving past it realize, and it's arriving at the same time as a 25-acre park purchase that almost nobody outside city hall has been tracking.
Here's what's actually built, what's still under a cone zone, and what changes for anyone who already lives, walks, or bikes through this stretch of Wilmington.
The One Mile That's Already Working
The first phase of the Greenville Loop Trail is done and has been for a while. A one-mile stretch along Holly Tree Road, running from South College Road to the Pine Grove Drive intersection, was completed back in 2023. The signalized pedestrian and bicycle crossing at South College Road that goes with it is also finished, and it's already doing its job: connecting people on foot or on a bike to the Central College Trail.
That segment is easy to miss if you're not looking for it, which is part of the problem with how this whole project reads to residents. It doesn't announce itself. It just quietly works.
The Two Miles Still Under Construction
This is where the timeline gets more interesting than the press releases suggest. In July 2025, Wilmington City Council approved roughly $3.7 million in funding for the trail's second section, a 1.6-mile stretch running from Pine Grove Drive to Old Military Road, with a total project cost of $3,864,253 funded through the city's 2014 transportation bond. The construction contract went to Wells Brothers Construction after a public bidding process, and the build was expected to take about nine months, with a completion target of spring 2026.
Spring 2026 has come and gone. As of August 20, city officials confirmed that phase two, along with phase three, is still underway. Phase three extends the corridor from Old Military Road toward Park Avenue and includes a planned signalized crossing at Oleander Drive, one of the busier intersections this trail has to cross to make the connection worthwhile.
Here's the phase-by-phase picture as it stands today:
| Phase | Segment | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Holly Tree Road, South College Road to Pine Grove Drive | Complete since 2023 |
| 2 | Pine Grove Drive to Old Military Road | Underway, past its spring 2026 target |
| 3 | Old Military Road to Park Avenue, with a crossing at Oleander Drive | Underway |
| 4 | Pine Grove Drive to Greenville Loop Road, closing the loop | Slated to begin in 2026 |
None of this is unusual for a bond-funded infrastructure project. It's worth remembering that the underlying 2014 transportation bond that funds this trail had, as of January 2020, only about 32 percent of its projects finished. Multi-year municipal construction moves in fits and starts, shaped by utility relocation, stormwater work, and right-of-way negotiations that don't show up in a headline. If you've been wondering why a trail announced years ago still has orange barrels on it, that's the honest answer.
Why the Fourth Phase Is the One to Watch
Phase four is the segment that actually closes the loop, running along Pine Grove Drive between Greenville Loop Road and Holly Tree Road, and it's designed to tie into a planned roundabout at the Pine Grove Drive and Greenville Loop Road intersection. City officials say this final phase is set to begin sometime in 2026, which means the project that started with a one-mile stretch in 2023 is only now entering its last leg.
Once it's finished, the full corridor stitches together into one continuous route: Central College Trail on one end, through the neighborhoods along Greenville Loop, out to Greenville Avenue and Park Avenue, where it meets the River to Sea Bikeway, the path that already runs from downtown Wilmington to Wrightsville Beach. Naklicki, the city's Construction Manager, put the broader ambition this way: "What it'll do is it'll connect the south side of the city down at 17th Street Extension and College Road." From there, the network reaches up through the Greenville Loop area, across Oleander, and eventually ties into paths near UNCW.
That's a different story than "there's a new bike trail." It's a story about a specific gap in Wilmington's pedestrian network finally closing, years after the bond that funds it was approved by voters.
The 25 Acres Behind the School
The trail isn't the only thing changing on Greenville Loop Road. In January 2026, city and county officials began pursuing an interlocal agreement to buy four tracts of land, at 6325, 6335, 6341, and 6345 Greenville Loop Road, totaling 25 largely undeveloped acres directly behind Bradley Creek Elementary. The New Hanover Community Endowment announced plans to award the city a $7.7 million provisional grant to fund the purchase.
The grant comes with a real deadline. The site has to be activated as a park and community-informed recreational amenity within five years of the award, or the city has to return the full $7.7 million to the Endowment within 30 days of that five-year window closing. That's not a soft planning goal. It's a clock that started ticking in early 2026, which means residents in this corridor should expect to see actual design and construction activity on that parcel well before 2031, not a slow-motion planning process that drifts for a decade the way some bond projects do.
Put the trail and the park together and the picture sharpens: the same stretch of road that's getting a safer school crossing is also getting a new green space large enough to matter, and both projects are tied to the same corridor and roughly the same timeline.
The Wider Pattern
Greenville Loop isn't happening in isolation. A few miles away, the Masonboro Loop Trail, a 1.5-mile path running from Navajo Trail to Pine Grove Road with a HAWK pedestrian crossing near a fire station and shopping area, was expected to finish this summer. City communications manager Amy Passaretti Willis described the broader philosophy behind these projects directly: "The city is committed to strengthening all modes of transportation, with a growing emphasis on walkability and bikeability." Once the Greenville Loop Trail is fully connected, it will also link to the Gary Shell Cross-City Trail and provide access to six WAVE bus stops along the route, according to city officials.
None of that changes what's true right now, today, for anyone navigating this part of town: there are still active construction zones on Pine Grove Drive and Old Military Road, the signal at Bradley Creek Elementary is new enough that drivers haven't fully adjusted to it yet, and the final phase hasn't started. What's changed is the confidence you can have that this is a project entering its home stretch rather than one stuck in permanent planning limbo.
If you've been driving past the cones on Greenville Loop Road wondering when this ends, the honest answer is: sooner than the last five years would suggest, but not this fall. Phase four hasn't broken ground yet. The park is still in the land-acquisition stage. What is real, right now, is a one-mile stretch of finished trail on Holly Tree Road, a new signal protecting kids at Bradley Creek Elementary, and a funded plan that finally has an end date attached to it.
For residents who've watched this corridor slowly reshape itself for the better part of a decade, that's the part worth knowing.
If you're curious how projects like this show up in the way a neighborhood actually lives day to day, not just in a city press release, that's the kind of on-the-ground detail Austin Kenyon tracks across Wilmington's coastal neighborhoods. Schedule a private consultation to talk through what's changing in your corner of the city.
