Walk the Peanut Line on a Saturday morning and you'll pass runners, a few dog walkers cutting through from the Cayuga Road side, and the occasional cyclist headed toward Akron for a Perry's cone. It feels finished. Paved, signed, mapped. What most people walking that stretch don't know is that the road their neighborhood is named after is doing something the trail itself hasn't done yet: it's already drawn on a regional map as the future edge of a bike corridor that reaches into the city of Buffalo.
That's the part worth sitting with. Harris Hill Road isn't part of the Clarence Pathways system today. It's asphalt, traffic, and a shoulder. But in the planning documents circulating between GObike Buffalo, the Town of Clarence, and the Town of Cheektowaga, it's already named as the eastern terminus of the longest proposed segment in a regional trails study, a corridor stretching nearly eight miles from Bailey Avenue in Buffalo all the way out to Harris Hill Road in Lancaster. That last detail throws people who know the area. Harris Hill sits in the Town of Clarence, but the hamlet is wedged right against the Lancaster town line, and Harris Hill Road crosses it. The study is simply naming the corridor by where the road physically ends.
The Corridor That Ends at Your Street
The project is called the Cheektowaga Trails Feasibility Study, and it's a partnership between GObike Buffalo, the Town of Clarence, and the Town of Cheektowaga. Of the segments under review, the one that matters most to Harris Hill residents is the Clarence Pathway Buffalo Extension: an almost eight-mile corridor running from Bailey Avenue in Buffalo out to Harris Hill Road in Lancaster. The proposal calls for on-road bike enhancements along Harris Hill Road and Wehrle Drive, paired with off-road facilities for cyclists and pedestrians where the terrain allows.
A feasibility study is not a shovel in the ground. It's the stage where planners map demand, survey residents, and figure out whether a corridor is worth funding before anyone touches pavement. The town has run this kind of process before elsewhere in the region, and those earlier studies took time to move from survey to construction. Treat this as the neighborhood's road showing up in the conversation, not as a project with a completion date.
Still, being named as a corridor terminus means something. It means the road most Harris Hill residents drive to get to Main Street or Wehrle Drive is now part of a real regional connectivity plan, one that would eventually let a cyclist ride from Buffalo's East Side to the edge of the neighborhood without leaving a mapped route.
What's Actually Under Construction Right Now
While that study plays out, the Town of Clarence is building three other pieces of its trail network in parallel. None of them sit inside Harris Hill's boundaries, but they show which direction the town is already moving, and the closest one runs along a road Harris Hill residents use constantly.
| Project | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|
| West Shore Line extension | Wehrle Drive | Under construction |
| Northwoods Trail | Northwoods subdivision, between Roll Road and Greiner Road | Construction bid approved by the Clarence Town Board |
| Spaulding Green Trail extension | Links Clarence Town Hall and the library on Goodrich Road to the Spaulding Green subdivision | Nearing final design |
Jonathan Bleuer, the town's Director of Community Development, laid out the logic behind the sequencing plainly:
"We continue to build out our own network: the West Shore Line extension is being constructed along Wehrle Dr., the Northwoods Trail construction bid was approved by the Clarence Town Board, and the Spaulding Green Trail extension is nearing the final design stage. Thus far, we have been hampered by the lack of Peanut Line Trail extension through Amherst, and the lack of West Shore Line Trail extension through Cheektowaga. It is encouraging that both Amherst and Cheektowaga are realizing the importance of regionally connected trails."
Read that closely and you get the real obstacle. Clarence has spent years building trail segments that dead-end at town lines because neighboring municipalities hadn't committed to their own connections. The Harris Hill Road corridor into Buffalo depends on Cheektowaga following through in the same way Clarence already has on Wehrle Drive.
The Northwoods Trail is a useful example of how these projects actually move. The town already opened a one-mile stretch of it, linking the Waterford Trail at Roll Road through the Northwoods subdivision to Greiner Road, a $560,000 project split roughly in half between town funding and New York State's Environmental Protection Fund. Then Supervisor Patrick Casilio said at the time that the town would keep connecting neighborhoods, schools, and parks to the trail system as opportunities came up. The construction bid the town board approved is the next phase of that same commitment, not a project starting from zero. That's the pattern worth expecting for Harris Hill Road too: a study, then a funding source, then a phase, then another one.
The Trail System You Can Already Use Today
None of this changes what's on the ground in Harris Hill right now, and that's worth describing on its own terms, because it's more built out than a lot of nearby hamlets can claim. The Clarence Pathways system runs roughly 20.5 miles across Clarence, Newstead, and Akron, stitched together from two old rail corridors: the West Shore Trail (also called the Newstead-Akron Bike Path) and the Peanut Line Trail, plus the shorter Waterford Trail and Spaulding Green Trail.
A few specifics that make the existing network worth using, not just admiring on a map:
- The Clarence Hollow Farmers Market sits directly on the West Shore Trail between Sawmill Road and Main Street, open Saturdays from June through October. It's billed locally as New York's only rails-to-trails farmers market.
- The trail passes the Clarence Historical Museum and the Goodrich-Landow Log Cabin, a structure built in 1825 and relocated from Goodrich Road.
- Riders who go the full distance end on Cedar Street in Akron, a couple of blocks from Perry's, the regional ice cream maker, with a pastry shop serving their products about two-tenths of a mile south on Main Street.
- Closer to home, the Clarence Deli at Main Street and Ransom Road is a standard stop before or after a ride, for a sandwich or one of their breakfast sandwiches if you're out early enough.
- Dogs are welcome on the paved sections but need to stay leashed, and the trail is used by snowmobilers in winter on two of its stretches, so it's worth knowing the season before you plan a walk after the first snow.
None of that touches Harris Hill Road directly today. The nearest paved access point for most Harris Hill residents is the West Shore Trail's western terminus at Wehrle Drive, which is itself in the middle of the extension project Bleuer mentioned.
What Changes for the Road Itself
If the Cheektowaga feasibility study moves from planning into funded construction, "on-road enhancements" on Harris Hill Road most commonly means things like shared-lane markings, shoulder striping, or signage rather than a separated path, since the corridor already carries daily traffic and doesn't have unused rail bed to build on the way the Peanut Line does. That's a meaningfully different experience than the wide, car-free pavement most Harris Hill residents associate with the word "trail" from using the Peanut Line or West Shore Trail.
Residents who want input on what that eventually looks like, whether that's bike lanes, wider shoulders, or crossing improvements at specific intersections, can weigh in directly through GObike Buffalo's project page for the Cheektowaga Trails Feasibility Study, which is still collecting resident feedback on amenities and priorities for the corridor.
The Name Predates the Trail Plan by Two Centuries
There's a bit of irony in a 21st-century trail study naming a road after a 19th-century tavern keeper without knowing it. Asa Harris settled the hilltop in 1807 and opened a tavern that gave the hamlet its name. When Buffalo burned during the War of 1812, Harris Hill became a haven for refugees fleeing the city, and freed people are said to have used limestone caves beneath what's now Main Street as an Underground Railroad route. The tavern building itself still stands, repurposed today as Reads Dry Cleaning & Shirt Laundry. The road has carried that history for over two hundred years. It's only now, for the first time, showing up on a bicycle infrastructure map that reaches all the way to Bailey Avenue in Buffalo.
Until that corridor moves from study to construction, the recreational center of gravity in the neighborhood stays right where it's always been: Harris Hill Park, 20 acres at 4085 Harris Hill Road with four lighted tennis courts, a ball diamond, four football fields, a playground, and horseshoe pits, all of it already finished and already yours to use.
If you're keeping an eye on how Harris Hill is changing, whether that's trail access, new construction, or anything else shaping the neighborhood, Benjamin Domagala tracks this market closely and is always glad to talk through what it means for your street specifically. Get Your Free Home Valuation or just say hello. Let's Connect.
