Joggers along the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail yesterday. (TBD)

Yesterday afternoon we took a tour along the Anacostia River on a Circulator bus. The purpose of the tour, led by the D.C. Department of Transportation (DDOT), was to show off the progress the city has made ten years into the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative, the massive project aimed at reviving and reshaping both sides of the city’s once-forgotten waterfront.

There were plenty of congratulations going around, particularly when it came to the $300 million 11th Street Bridge Project. Scheduled to be completed in mid-2013, the new bridge will have three separate arteries -- an inbound freeway, an outbound freeway, and a local road. John Dietrich, a former DDOT head engineer now working in Cincinnati, proclaimed, a bit grandly, that the final product “will be the cornerstone of DDOT’s fame nationally.”

Readers of this blog might be interested most in that local portion of the new bridge. Anyone who’s tried crossing the current 11th Street Bridge sans automobile knows that it’s a cramped and generally unpleasant experience. But on the downriver side of the new local bridge we’ll see a 16-foot-wide pathway reserved for pedestrians and cyclists. This path is important logistically and, some might say, symbolically -- it will tell the city west of the river that Anacostia is a community worth walking to.

And by all indications it will be a pleasant walk. Or bike ride. The tour went along portions of what will eventually be the 20-mile Anacostia Riverwalk Trail, stretching from the Tidal Basin all the way upriver to the Maryland line. The pedestrian bridge will connect sections on both sides of the river, making for just the kind of extensive trail network that this side of the city has been waiting for. Portions of the trail are now in the process of being transferred from the federal park service to D.C.

Of course, much of the Riverwalk Trail is already in use, though now it's a bit disjointed. DDOT has been working to build pedestrian/bike bridges over the CSX train tracks on both sides of the river to fill in the gaps. The tour went along the bridge construction site on the west side of the river, near the new Anacostia Community Boathouse location, and DDOT officials said it should be wrapped up by the end of the year. The pedestrian bridge on the east side of the river will follow.

As we toured the east side, a handful of joggers and cyclists were out availing themselves of the freshly laid trail (see photo above). In the background we could see the Navy Yard and recently unveiled Yards Park through the breaks in the trees on the waterline. It made for an awfully nice view on a gorgeous day, and it gave a lot of us something to look forward to.