Recently a meeting was held in my neighborhood of Riverdale, New York, about where to put a bike path. Not just any bike path: this will be the local link in a bicycle route that is envisioned to link Albany, New York (also on the Hudson River, some 140 miles north) with Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan. The project is known as the Hudson River Greenway, and it has been in the works since the early 1990s.

I take a personal interest in the Greenway because I like to ride my bike from home in Riverdale—a corner of the Bronx which borders Westchester County to the north and the Hudson River to the west—down to my office on Cooper Square in Manhattan’s East Village. You might picture a hellish passage of traffic lights, honking horns, and aggressive drivers, but eleven of the sixteen miles of it have none of that: they’re on the Greenway along Manhattan’s west side, practically on the river. The Greenway has great views and a breeze off the water. And it is never more glorious than when traffic is backed up on the West Side Highway—often just a few yards away—and I’m going faster than the cars.

But I can’t access the Greenway in my neighborhood. Instead, I’ve got to ride those mean streets into Manhattan, more than two miles away. For the Greenway to extend up the Hudson nearer my neighborhood, there needs to be some major reimagining of space. And that happens slowly. During much of American history, for example, a river was a place to put a factory. It is hard to move a factory, even if it’s defunct. The banks of the Hudson were also deemed convenient for railroad lines, highways, grand residential estates, a water treatment plant, and at least one famous prison. So a path needs to find its way through these things, or around them.

Riverdale has a long, narrow park, beloved of dog walkers, that isn’t quite on the water—the railroad tracks cut it off—but it’s close. I was on the board of a local planning and preservation group in the mid-90s, just when the Greenway was gaining steam. At one meeting, the board considered ideas being floated by the state for where the bike path should go. The ideal place seemed to be the railroad corridor: of five tracks, the one closest to the water got very little use. But railroads don’t like to give up land.

The park seemed to me an obvious second choice and I said so. Naively, I assumed that anyone who was pro-park would be pro-bike path. But a firestorm of objections followed: using the park would require paving a dirt path, which would take away from the natural feel. And linking to the larger path would channel outsiders through, literally, our neck of the woods, promoting noise, litter, and crime.

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North of Manhattan, parts of the Greenway are proceeding slowly, especially given the state’s budget crisis. But when the park route came up again in the recent meeting, I felt that history was on its side. That’s because history, as I write in The Routes of Man, can be seen as a story of increasing connectedness. In the course of researching my first chapter, about the making of a highway that will soon connect the east and west coasts of South America for the first time, I wondered why there’s still no road between North America and South America. Years after it was envisioned, the PanAmerican Highway still does not go through. What could be more logical than a route between Panama and Colombia. What happened to it?

According to Ben Ryder Howe in The Atlantic, in the 1970s the United States withdrew funding for a road through the Darién Gap, as the unlinked stretch is called, over concerns that included the environment (the gap includes a huge swamp) but especially the possible spread of foot-and-mouth disease, a sickness of cattle that persists in parts of South America but is rare to the north. What could be the major north-south route of the Americas instead remains an isolated backwater, largely out of government control. Robert Young Pelton, a writer who has made courting danger into the topic of books and television shows, ventured into the Colombian part of the Gap and was promptly kidnapped by rebels. (He was released ten days later.)

Part of me is glad that, in our ever-more-networked world, a few backwaters remain (even if some of them are congenial to bandits). One of those, I suppose, is Riverdale Park. On days when the weather is bad, I leave my bike at home and walk the twenty minutes or so down to the station to catch a commuter train into the city, passing along the way through about a half mile of that long strip of park. You can hear the song of birds down there, and be alone outdoors in New York City, both of which are precious things. I imagine the path won’t be paved soon, and I’d much prefer it be along the water. But I bet that someday there will be a path, just as I’m sure that some day there will be a road through the Darién Gap: the tide of connectedness, I think, is impossible to resist.