One section of a 1,700-mile footpath stretching from New York to Florida — called the Great Eastern Trail — could be closer to reality as city officials look at a walkway across the Tennessee River on the C.B. Robinson Bridge.

“It gets us a few steps closer to a walkable trail,” said Jeffrey Hunter, an advisor to the Great Eastern Trail Association.

At the same time, constructing a pedestrian and biking path across the bridge and DuPont Parkway also gets the city closer to its objective of 75 to 100 miles of trail as part of the Chattanooga greenway master plan, said Rick Wood, executive director of the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit organization that conserves land for people to enjoy as parks, gardens, natural areas or open space.

In addition, it also helps extend the Tennessee Riverwalk, something that has not been extensively done in almost three years, Mr. Wood said.

The Great Eastern Trail continues to be built outside of Hamilton County in parts of Virginia and northward, officials said. As it heads south, it links up with the Cumberland Trail north of Knoxville and comes into Hamilton County along Walden’s Ridge.

Mr. Hunter said the plan is to connect the trail with the Tennessee Riverpark and the North Chickamauga Creek Greenway, linking up to the Cumberland State Trail. From that point, it will enter Georgia on its way to Florida, he said.

“That was the vision,” Mr. Hunter said.

The city recently received a $140,000 grant from the Tennessee Department of Transportation for a study on how a walkway can be built across the C.B. Robinson Bridge near Hixson, city officials said. The Lyndhurst Foundation matched part of the grant with $35,000, officials said.

Chattanooga Parks and Recreation Administrator Larry Zehnder said TDOT would hire engineers to conduct the study, which should be completed by the spring.

TDOT spokeswoman Julie Oaks said she could not say when the study might be completed. She said the department had not heard anything from the city about the project since 2006. City officials said they would be sending a letter to TDOT officials that would notify them of the contract between a consulting company and the city.

Initially, city officials wanted to suspend a walkway underneath the bridge as a way to avoid some of the heavy traffic along DuPont Parkway, Mr. Wood said. But the threat of rising water levels and boats bumping against the bridge made that impossible, he said.

Instead, the plan now is to raise the path across the top of the bridge, he said. The study will help pinpoint how that can be done and also how the walkway can be built safely along the well-traveled parkway, he said.

“It’ll provide what TDOT will be able to do on that bridge,” he said. “It’s also planning on how you get up and how you come down, the ramping. It’s not going to be an easy task.”

Once across the Tennessee River, city officials will need to start looking at how they can continue expansion of the Tennessee Riverwalk, Mr. Zehnder said. The goal is to head west along the North Shore toward Rivermont Park on one end and east along the North Shore toward Greenway Farm on the other, he said.

Both areas have private property in between, he said. BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee owns the property west of the bridge and Invista Corp. owns land to the east.

The BlueCross property contains Lupton City Golf Club and Dan Hoffman, who leases the property and manages the course, said there is about 1,000 to 1,500 feet between the course and the river, so a trail could be placed in the area.

“I would hope they wouldn’t put it on the golf course,” he said. “That would be pretty stupid.”

Ultimately, it would be up to the landowners to decide if the Riverwalk could come through the area, he said.

Scott Wilson, spokesman for BlueCross, said the Trust for Public Land has talked to the company about coming through the property.

“We intend to sell that property,” he said. “We feel it would be the most appropriate for the future landowners of the Lupton City property to make those decisions.”

On the east end, Invista Corp., owners of the former DuPont plant, said they would have to see a proposal to make any decisions, according to Erica Taylor, company spokeswoman. In the past, the company donated land to the city that’s now the North River Soccer Complex, officials said.

“We would still want to be a good corporate neighbor,” she said.

Mr. Wood said the total cost of the proposed walkway has not been discussed and funding has not been gathered. He said it took public and private donors to build the Tennessee Riverwalk.

“We’d hope we’d have those same entities involved,” he said.

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