WOONSOCKET — Now under development for over 10 years, it’s easy to find people in Northern Rhode Island taking advantage of completed portions of the Blackstone River Bikeway.

But while city residents can start out on a section of the bikeway at the city’s new Davison Street recreational facility, what they get is a ride or walk on a path leading nowhere.

The city built just under a mile of paved bike path along its riverside soccer field and putting green facility off Davison Street but that project has not been linked to the latest Lincoln portion of the path from Manville to the Woonsocket line due to a small 2,000-foot section of path still to be built.

The short disconnect has left the city’s portion of path ending at the southern corner of the recreational field, not far from the Providence-Worcester Railroad, and a section of sloping woods above the city’s water treatment plant. It’s a dead end that will likely keep Woonsocket users of the path close to home through this summer.

The Manville portion of the path, already busy with walkers, runners, bicyclists and rollerbladers, ends at the driveway into the city’s water treatment plant from Manville Road.

“We’re disappointed but progress moves forward slower than we like sometimes,” Joel D. Mathews, city Director of Planning and Development and a long-time promoter of the project, said this week.

The city completed its portion of the path as part of its work to reclaim the former city landfill off Davison Street for recreational use. The city spent $970,000 in federal and state grant funding with a share of its Community Development Block Grant to build the bike path and another $1.8 million in similar funding to make use of the closed and capped landfill site.

For now, local residents will have to be content with short walks on the city section of the path while the final section of work on a link-up is completed over the summer, Mathews noted.

The 2,000-foot section of path had been considered for addition to contracts for the Manville extension of the path last year, but the Department of Transportation concluded a separate bid process would be required to handle the link up, he noted.

The state has now secured a $517,149 bid from Lucena Brothers Construction of Cumberland and is expected to begin work on the hook-up of the two sections in June.

When that work is completed in November, someone parking their car at the new entry point on Davison Street will be able to travel by foot or by bike just over 11 miles to the existing bikepath’s current endpoint near Cumberland Town Hall on Broad Street.

The route will provide area residents with an alternative to the increasingly tortuous automobile trip along Mendon Road to Cumberland Town Hall and savings on expensive gasoline costs as an added benefit.

“The bikepath as always been viewed as a transportation alternative and is still viewed as an alternative transportation route,” Lambri Zerva, supervising civil engineer for the DOT, said when contacted about the path’s progress on Wednesday.

People are using the path for recreation and will continue to do that when the Woonsocket link up is finally constructed, but the goal of the path from the start has been to allow people another means of travel in the valley, he noted.

“People have been using the bikepath since 1998 and every year we just give them more of it to use,” he said. The access point in Woonsocket expected to be connected in late fall will just add a whole new group of people and a new destinations to the route, he explained.

Work has been slow at times on the path as the state sought to purchase sections of needed land or had to take extra care in design and building the route through environmentally sensitive sections of its riverside location.

There were also the requirements for going out to bid on the public work and the time needed to secure state and federal financing for the sections of path completed along the way.

By the time Woonsocket junction opens a total of $22.8 million will have been spent by the DOT on the route running from Davison Street to Broad Street in Cumberland. And work will continue after that as well, he noted. Ultimately, the Blackstone River Bikeway is expected to follow a mix of off-road routes and city street lane designations to a connection to the East Bay Bikepath in Providence. The Woonsocket portion of the route with continue on past the city’s new middle school site, make crossing of the Blackstone River near the public library to link with River Island Park and Market Square and then continue on to North Smithfield and Blackstone along River Street. From there the path is expected to someday carry on through Massachusetts to Worcester.

Zerva, a resident of Woonsocket himself, would like to have seen the city’s connection to the path made sooner, but also knows that work on the route must be done properly and safely. The section leaving the recreational facility will be close to the Providence Worcester Railroad and will have to be graded and protected with barriers as was done with the section south of the water treatment plant.

That makes it unlikely that the route will be connected before the planned five-month construction period, he noted. But with the contract already awarded, Zerva said the connection is coming and local residents will eventually begin to travel south on the path from Davison Street.

“It’s a small piece but it’s a very significant piece and we are doing what we can to finish it quickly,” he said. “When it opens, it is going to open up the bikepath to a lot more people and that is what we are trying to accomplish,” Zerva said.

Some local residents are already making use of the Woonsocket section of path already constructed even if it means walking loops through the Davison Street facility.

Kandie Moritz and Marie Desautels were found walking at the city section of path on Wednesday and say there is already lots to like there.

Desautels remembers visiting the old dump location on Saturdays with her family years ago and said it doesn’t look anything like that now.

“I like it now because of all the wildlife you can see,” she said. The restoration has created a site with expansive green lawns running to riverbanks dotted by trees and other natural vegetation, she noted.

“We have seen ducks and swans and even baby muskrats,” she said.

Mortiz said the pair have also learned some of the area’s history while talking to people working on the project and hadn’t known anything about the old Blackstone Canal until they were told a section of it remains near the bike path.

Mortiz said they are also looking forward to being able to head south on the path for their regular walks. “We usually walk about two and a half hours and right now we just walk back and forth on the path here,” she said.

Would they be willing to walk all the way to Broad Street when the local section is linked to Manville? Desautels said that was unlikely. “I think we are going to have to take a bike,” she said.