Ed McBrayer, co-founder of PATH who helped shape Atlanta, dies at 81

Out for a ride to Stone Mountain with a pair of friends in the summer of 1991, the trio recognized the Atlanta area needed the dedicated trails for walkers, runners and fellow cyclists that were popping up in metro areas across the country, forging closer connections between cities and their suburbs and improving the health of residents. Trails could be vital infrastructure, they thought, to connect fans with venues during the upcoming 1996 Centennial Olympic Games.

McBrayer, along with friends and allies, soon created the PATH Foundation. The nonprofit has partnered with state and local governments and private funders to spur development of hundreds of miles of trails throughout the Atlanta area. PATH helped steer development of the Atlanta Beltline and its connector trails, the Silver Comet Trail and trail networks in Carrollton, St. Simons Island and Beaufort, South Carolina.

Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal

Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal

As PATH’s founding executive director, McBrayer made it his goal to make Atlanta the most trail-connected city in the nation.

Jim Kennedy, chairman emeritus of Cox Enterprises and chairman of the James M. Cox Foundation, called McBrayer a visionary who took the concept of the Colorado trails he loved and through his work and advocacy reshaped the city.

“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say every foot of trail you see in this region has Ed’s DNA in it,” Kennedy said Friday. “He got the movement going and it’s just growing.”

McBrayer, who retired from PATH in 2020, died at his home in Milledgeville on Friday. He was 81. A cause of death was not announced. He’s survived by his longtime husband, Wendell York.

At the family’s request, no services are planned at this time.

PATH has created alternative ways of getting around in a region famed for its traffic, often using abandoned railroad corridors and other right-of-way, to connect neighborhoods and metro Atlanta’s commercial centers.

McBrayer was honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Urban Land Institute, among many accolades.

PATH’s public-private model has inspired cities across the nation. McBrayer worked with governments to provide more than $200 million in public funds while PATH and its board raised another $120 million from nonprofits and other donors, according to a family obituary.

Maxine Rock, a member of that 1991 ride to Stone Mountain and a fellow PATH co-founder, told the AJC in a 2008 interview that McBrayer was relentless. He not only set a strenuous pace as a cyclist and as a fitness instructor, a passion of his for many years, but as PATH’s leader.

“He has an engineer’s mind and Superman’s ability … it’s almost unbeatable,” said Rock, who died in 2019.

Born in Gainesville, Edwin Eugene McBrayer Jr. was the only child of the late Edwin Eugene McBrayer Sr. and the late Lucille Royal McBrayer.

He graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in aerospace engineering and later moved to Colorado to work for Martin-Marietta and NASA on the Skylab project. While in Colorado, he volunteered as a planning commissioner in the Denver suburb of Englewood, working on design of the South Platte River trail.

Kennedy, himself a cyclist, said he was introduced to McBrayer through friends and early PATH board members in the 1990s when the foundation was merely an idea.

Kennedy joined PATH’s board and led capital campaigns for the nonprofit. The Cox Foundation has also been a key contributor. Cox Enterprises is the parent company of the AJC.

PATH soon built demonstration trails in southwest Atlanta and Clarkston, according to the organization’s website. It later branched out with the Stone Mountain-Atlanta Trail, the Eastside Trolley Trail, the Westside Trail and the first installment of the trail around Chastain Park.

In the late 1990s, came the beginnings of the Silver Comet, a path on state right-of-way that connects Cobb County to Alabama and is one of the longest continuous paved trails in the U.S. McBrayer and PATH worked with local and state governments to make the trail a reality.

“He was a master of getting permits, knowing who to talk to, knowing how to speed things up and building the support groups,” Kennedy said.

Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal

Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal

The Beltline, originally envisioned in the 1990s by then-Georgia Tech graduate student Ryan Gravel, connects dozens of in-town neighborhoods. PATH was among the early champions of the loop of planned trails, parks and future transit on old rail lines circling the city core, working in tandem with Atlanta Beltline Inc. on planning and construction.

When the first installment of the 22-mile loop opened in 2012, a segment of the Eastside Trail from Piedmont Park to just north of DeKalb Avenue, McBrayer called the moment “a big first step” for the multibillion-dollar project.

“This will be a model case to see if the Beltline can be all that we think it can be,” he told the AJC. “This starts a network we’ve been looking for, for 20 years.”

He added, “This section will either prove or disprove that economic development will follow green space as we think it might.”

Billions of dollars in real estate development have followed. The Beltline has become not only a connector but one of the city’s best-loved amenities, though efforts to build transit on the loop have stalled.

“Ed was an early believer and partner in the Beltline’s vision, which was always more than a trail,” Gravel said on Friday, adding that McBrayer believed in the “bigger, more inclusive vision” of the project.

The family obituary said in lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to PATH Foundation, 1601 West Peachtree St., Atlanta, Ga., 30309, or PATHFoundation.org.