Since 2017, the first section of Mobile’s Three Mile Creek Greenway has stood as a tantalizing taste of a grand vision: A recreational pathway that will someday give runners, walkers and cyclists a path connecting Langan Park and the nearby USA campus to downtown.

Five years later, the wait for tangible progress has been longer than anyone would have liked, including the city planners heading up the project. The initial stretch of the pathway, a ribbon reaching from the east end of Tricentennial Park westward through the park, across Stanton Road and on to a point past the Strickland Youth Center, hasn’t been extended by a foot.

That’s not what anyone expected in September 2020, when the Mobile City Council formally accepted a near-$10 million federal grant for the project. The money was awarded under the process established by the RESTORE Act, which channels fines and penalties collected after the Deepwater Horizon Disaster. For some time, the sense from city leaders was that planning was well under way and that when the money arrived, work would proceed rapidly: First the trail would be extended westward, approaching USA Health University Hospital. Then it would extend east to St. Stephens Road. The Greenway would no longer just be an exercise path: It would be a connection.

The projection at the time was that extension work would continue in both directions through 2021 and into 2022, so that by the present day the Greenway would be about three miles long. It would provide a path from Crichton to Downtown, with three public parks, three hospitals and a public library within easy reach along the way.

None of that has happened yet.