It’s a beauty – well protected from traffic by a barrier, a great asset for safely riding over the Seekonk River.

The plan was to continue it another mile or so along East Providence’s Waterfront Drive, ultimately connecting with the East Bay Bike Path, which runs all the way to Bristol. Which, by the way, is one of the nicest bike paths you’ll find anywhere.

But alas, that connector plan has been canceled.

So the expensive stretch over the Henderson Bridge to East Providence is now a bike path to nowhere. Once the bridge ends, the path on it continues a few hundred yards or so and then, just … ends.

Too bad.

We were so close.

Most of the stories on the issue have been about the complex negotiation to rescue the $25 million by rerouting it to that nearby highway-to-boulevard project. But I don’t want to get lost in the weeds of that bureaucratic process here because it loses sight of the heart of this story.

Which is that an amazing new addition to one of the nation’s best state bike path systems has just been scrapped.

You can knock the Rhode Island government for blowing a lot of things.

The PawSox.

The Washington Bridge.

But they’ve done great with bike paths.

And especially, linking many of them together.

Example: not too many years ago, Providence bikers had to risk dicey traffic on the East Side to get to the more pleasant paths in India Point Park and on the 195 bridge to the East Bay Path.

But the state fixed that by adding an amazing connector that starts behind the Salvation Army building and beautifully winds along the water of the Seekonk River for a mile or so.

That makes a huge difference – and no doubt has avoided some bike-car accidents.

We were close to a comparable stretch on the other side of the river – that’s what the $25 million would have done.

But it’s now apparently dead.

Online commenters aren’t happy about it.

On a Reddit string, “Toadscoper” accused the state of being “complicit” with the feds in rerouting the money from bikes to cars.

And there was this fascinating post from FineLobster 5322, who apparently is a disappointed planner who worked on the project: “Mind you money has already been spent on phase one so rejecting it at this point is wasting money and also against the public interest … but what do I know? I only worked on the project as an engineer … I didn’t get into this to build more highways. I do it … to give back to communities and give them more access to their environment.”

Wow. One can imagine the state planning team is devastated. That’s not a small consideration. Good people go into government to make life better in Rhode Island, and it’s a bad play to take the spirit out of the job by first assigning a great human-scale project and then, after a ton of work, trashing it.

A poster named Homosapiens simply said, “We just accept this?”

Hopefully not.

The first stretch of the path over the Henderson Bridge is done, money already sunk.

What a shame to leave that as a path to nowhere.

It doesn’t have to happen.

Between Governor McKee and our Washington delegation, there’s got to be a way to get this done.

There’s got to be.

mpatinki@providencejournal.com