Chantilly Park's New Trail Is Paved. One Bridge Is Holding Everything Up.
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
Walk Bramlet Road on a summer evening and you will see it: fresh asphalt curving into Chantilly Park, a trailhead lot recently poured, and a chain-link fence still blocking the way in. For a project that looks finished from the sidewalk, the Briar Creek Greenway's newest stretch through Chantilly has spent this year in an odd holding pattern. The pavement is down. The trail is not open. And the reason comes down to one structure that has proven harder to build than the half mile of trail around it.
Here is where the project actually stands, what it will connect once it opens, and what it will not.
Construction on this segment, known as the Briar Creek Greenway Phase 1, started in the summer of 2025 after Mecklenburg County issued a notice to proceed on August 18 of that year. The scope is a little under half a mile of new trail, 2,323 feet of asphalt and concrete by the engineer's measure, running from Bay Street through Chantilly Park to Monroe Road, with additional access points at Laburnum Avenue and Bramlet Road. The county's $1.7 million price tag covers that stretch alone.
By early June 2026, the county's own project updates showed the main paved line largely complete, with the Bramlet Road trailhead parking lot scheduled to finish paving the week of June 8. If you have walked past recently and wondered why a finished-looking trail still has closure signs up, that is why: the site remains an active construction zone, not a soft-opened park amenity.
The one piece that has not fallen into place is the pedestrian bridge over Briar Creek itself. As of the June update, the bridge structure had been delivered and placed on site, but the pilings meant to anchor it were giving the project's engineers trouble. The county's language at the time was that options were being worked through to resolve it as quickly as possible. No revised completion date has been published since. The project's general target remains mid to late 2026, but a creek crossing with foundation problems is not something a construction crew can paper over with a deadline.
It is worth sitting with why that detail matters more than it sounds like it should. A half mile of paved trail with no way across the creek is not a shorter version of the finished product. It is two disconnected trail segments waiting on a single piece of infrastructure to make them one.
The alignment through Chantilly Park is not an arbitrary planning choice. This stretch of Briar Creek sits inside what Mecklenburg County calls the Chantilly Ecological Sanctuary, a stream restoration and stormwater project that started years before anyone was talking about a greenway. The county's Storm Water Services division bought out and removed the Doral and Cavalier apartment complexes, both of which sat inside Briar Creek's 100-year floodplain, using FEMA's flood mitigation buyout program. That buyout freed up the land for stream restoration, stormwater retrofits, and eventually room for the trail itself.
That history explains a lot about the pace here. This was never a simple paving job. It is trail construction layered on top of a floodplain restoration project, on a creek that has already proven capable of complicating a straightforward engineering task, which is exactly what is happening with the bridge pilings now.
Here is the part that is easy to assume incorrectly. Once this segment opens, Chantilly residents will not be able to walk or bike straight through to Plaza Midwood's existing trail network across US-74. That connection depends on two more phases that have not started.
Phase 2 would run from Masonic Drive and Central Avenue to Morningside Drive, adding roughly 0.8 miles. Phase 3 would run from Morningside Drive back to Bay Street, adding about 0.3 miles, and includes relocating the existing pedestrian bridge that currently serves Chantilly Montessori School to a nearby but different location. Both phases are still in design. Neither has a construction schedule. Part of the delay is coordination with NCDOT's Hwy 74 improvements and the CATS Silver Line transit project, both of which touch the same corridor and need to be sequenced rather than built around.
The overall Central-to-Monroe project, all three phases combined, represents an $11.3 million investment and 1.6 miles of new trail. Phase 1 is the first third of that by mileage, and the part closest to finished. The link that would actually tie Chantilly's trail network into Plaza Midwood's is the part still on the drawing board.
The timeline here is not an aberration. It's a preview of how these things move.
At the southern tip of Chantilly, along Independence Boulevard, a residential project called Chantilly On The Green replaced a former business center with a modern townhome community and six single-family homes. The site sits directly adjacent to Briar Creek, and it was designed from the start to connect into the future Briar Creek Greenway extension. That development wrapped construction in 2021. Five years later, the trail it was built to connect to is still working through a bridge foundation problem. If you are counting on greenway access as a selling point for a property near this corridor, it is worth knowing just how long the runway on public trail infrastructure actually is, regardless of how ready the private development around it might look.
None of this means Chantilly has been waiting on this one project for its outdoor access. The broader Briar Creek Greenway already exists in four separate, unconnected segments totaling about 2.9 miles. One runs roughly half a mile between the Merry Oaks and Plaza Midwood neighborhoods, crossing a pedestrian bridge over a wooded creek partway through. Another, already open today, runs between Chantilly Park and Chantilly Montessori School, the same stretch that will eventually be rerouted when Phase 3 relocates that school bridge. Farther south, about a mile of trail runs through Eastover Park, and the southernmost mile flanks the west side of Myers Park High School.
Parking varies by segment and it shows. The northernmost stretch has on-street parking along Masonic Drive. The section near the schools has none to speak of. The southern end has a workable option at Alexander Graham Middle School on Runneymede Lane, but only when school is not in session. If you already walk this network, you know these tradeoffs. If you are new to it, they are worth knowing before you plan a route around them.
The honest read is that the trail through Chantilly Park is close, not close and connected. The paving is largely finished. The parking lot is finished or nearly so. The piece standing between a mostly built trail and a usable one is a bridge foundation that engineers were still working through as of the county's last public update. Beyond that, the bigger promise, a walkable link from Chantilly straight into Plaza Midwood's existing trail system, sits behind two more phases that have not been scheduled.
For updates as they come, Mecklenburg County posts progress directly on the project's public engagement page, and Axios Charlotte has been tracking the county's greenway rollout as new segments near completion across 2026.
Infrastructure like this rarely moves as fast as a fresh coat of asphalt suggests. It's one more reason it helps to have someone paying attention to the details that shape a neighborhood over years, not just the ones visible from the curb. If you are curious how projects like this factor into the way Chantilly's homes are valued and shown, Jessica Grier is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.
Whether advising on an in-town estate, a new luxury build, or an investment opportunity, Jessica offers discretion, distinction, and results. Work with Jessica Today!