If you want to go for a spin up the Lower Don Trail, you’d better be prepared for some headaches until at least July.

City officials say construction on the trail, originally slated for completion last fall, won’t be finished until July.

That means a major section of the trail between Riverdale Park and Pottery Rd. remains inaccessible.

“It’s a little extreme,” said cyclist Barbara Sless, standing in front of the fenced-off closure on Saturday.

Sless and her husband, Alan, are training for the Ride to Conquer Cancer later this summer. They had to cut their Saturday hills training session short because of the closure, which they didn’t expect.

Sless said she’s experienced headaches with the Don Valley trail system before.

When she and Alan lived in the Leaside neighbourhood a few years ago, they would often ride down the Don Valley trails to the Brickworks. But when crews started doing construction on those trails, Sless said parts of the network were closed then as well.

“They made a total mess of it, and they closed it for like the whole summer. That’s when people use it. They wouldn’t even allow you to come down,” Sless said.

Matthew Cutler, a spokesman for the city’s parks department, said staff is well aware of trail users’ frustration. In many cases, they share that annoyance.

“I sometimes remind people that folks in the city departments also use those spaces,” Cutler said.

“I live in the neighbourhood. Last week when the Don Valley Pkwy. was closed, I thought, ‘Hey, I’m going to go down to the Don,’ and it’s frustrating being unable to do that. It’s a bit brutal,” he said.

Right now the trail is open from the Corktown Commons to the pedestrian overpass at Riverdale Park. From there, the city recommends crossing the DVP on the pedestrian bridge and following Broadview Ave. up to Pottery Rd. before crossing back over the parkway.

For cyclists, that means carrying their bikes up a large staircase, and then contending with many kilometres worth of streetcar tracks and traffic along Broadview.

Cutler said the project is delayed because of unexpected engineering problems with the expansion to the Belleview underpass.

“When we unearthed the area to start building up the new underpass, we actually found foundations from a previous bridge that we weren’t aware were there,” he said.

“So the whole thing had to be re-engineered. We were expecting a fall opening last year. We’re now looking at a summer opening,” Cutler said.

Compounding that delay are two other factors. First is the difficulty construction crews have operating in The Narrows area, which is environmentally sensitive and simply doesn’t have room for a detour, Cutler said.

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The second is a traffic control issue. When the project first began, Cutler said city staff had planned for a shorter full-time closure of only a few weeks, followed by intermittent closures as necessary to accommodate things like heavy equipment and other safety concerns.

That would have allowed the underpass to be open much more often, but trail users didn’t co-operate, he said.

“Signs don’t get obeyed; signal people sometimes get blown past by cyclists. It was creating an unsafe environment and we couldn’t guarantee that construction workers and the public could safely be in the same place at the same time,” Cutler said.

That forced the city to close the underpass entirely until the project is complete.

The signage and fence closure at the Riverdale pedestrian bridge is ambiguous at best. Blue metal fencing blocks most of the pathway, and there are backward-facing construction signs that are hard to read. On Saturday, dozens of cyclists, runners and walkers ignored the fencing, walking around it and following a dirt pathway that appeared to bypass the construction site itself.

Two of those hikers were Mark Ber and Delores Wurtz. They were also frustrated by the closure. Wurtz said they are training to hike the Camino de Santiago trail — a 788-kilometre pilgrimage through Spain.

“It seems like the work that they’re doing, it doesn’t really appear that it should have taken this long to complete,” Ber said.

“We come down here quite a bit and we’ve never seen construction workers,” he said.

The underpass construction is part of a larger revitalization project laid out in the Lower Don Trail Master Plan. It includes other major infrastructure projects including staircases and a switchback at Riverdale Park that will be installed over the next 10 years. Cutler said the headaches encountered with the underpass have made it clear that better planning is needed in the future.

“Based on our funding model it could be that each of these gets done one at a time over a 10-year period, and then over the next 10 years the trail is close more often then it’s open,” Cutler said.

“This has flagged for us that we need to be more co-ordinated on those projects because we know how vital the trail is not just as a recreation corridor but as a transportation corridor.”