• Greenways offer recreational opportunities by providing safe, accessible routes for walking, running, bicycling, and other forms of exercise, and for enjoying increasingly hard-to-find natural areas close to home.
   
• Greenways improve environmental quality by protecting plant and animal habitat. They help clean our water and air through the dedication of sensitive areas, such as flood plains, wetlands, and forests, to low-impact uses.
   
• Greenways facilitate alternative transportation by providing bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly routes between home, work, and other destinations. By providing such non-automotive facilities, greenways are a part of the infrastructure necessary for an integrated approach to transportation planning.

Collectively, these and other benefits make greenways critical to Nashville's quality of life. In fact, it seems difficult to conceive of a more efficient way to accomplish so many desirable objectives. And accomplishing these goals is essential to Nashville's economic development. Unless growth is balanced with protection of the natural resources that contribute to our quality of life, it risks being counterproductive. Greenways are a planning tool that eliminates many of the perceived or real conflicts between quality of life and development goals, and, in fact, makes preserving natural areas and expanding recreational opportunities an economic development tool.