The Murphy Bridle Path Works Great, Until You Try To Bike It
Every Saturday morning, somewhere between 7 and 9 a.m., the stretch of dirt along Central Avenue between Bethany Home Road and the Arizona Canal turns into North Central Phoenix's most crowded piece of unpaved ground. Dog walkers move at dog-walker pace. Runners try to pass them. A parent pushes a stroller three abreast with a friend. Somewhere in the mix, a cyclist is threading through all of it because there is nowhere else on this stretch of Central to ride.
That last part is the detail most write-ups of the Murphy Bridle Path skip. The path gets called historic, shaded, dog-friendly, a neighborhood treasure. All of that is true. What's less discussed is that it was never built to hold the traffic it now carries, and the neighborhood has already started asking the city to fix that.
The path exists because of citrus trees, not joggers. William J. Murphy platted the Orangewood subdivision along Central Avenue in 1895, and the ash trees that shade today's walkers went in between 1895 and 1906, with olive trees following from 1906 to 1915. The dirt track on the east side of the street was formalized as a bridle path in 1948, when the Arizona Horse Lovers' Club dedicated it for the equestrians who still rode into what was then the edge of Phoenix.
None of that history changed the path's footprint. It still runs about 2.5 miles, from the northeast corner of Bethany Home and Central north to the Arizona Canal, and it's still a single wide lane of packed dirt. What changed is who's on it. The horses are gone. In their place: an estimated cross-section of the corridor's dog walkers, distance runners, parents, and increasingly, cyclists who have no other option, because Central Avenue itself carries four lanes of traffic with no bike lane in either direction.
This is the part that doesn't show up in the postcard version of the story. The Murphy Bridle Path isn't just narrow by choice. It's boxed in.
On the west side of Central, running parallel to the path, sits a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation irrigation lateral that the Salt River Project still maintains today, a working piece of water infrastructure that predates most of the houses around it. On the east side is the path itself, then residential lots. There are no curbs and no paved sidewalks anywhere in this right-of-way except where it crosses side streets. The result is a corridor where every foot of ground already has a job: four lanes of moving traffic, an active irrigation channel, and a dirt trail wedged between them.
Widening the path, or carving out a dedicated bike lane, means taking space from one of those existing uses. That's a different problem than most historic trails face, where the fix is usually just money and asphalt. Here, the fix runs into a working canal system on one side and a four-lane arterial on the other.
None of this stops residents from building a genuine weekend rhythm around the corridor, and that rhythm has two centers of gravity now, not one.
The path itself still anchors the classic version: a walk or run timed to a coffee stop at the Uptown Farmers Market, which Phoenix New Times specifically called out when it named the Murphy Bridle Path the city's Best Walking Path in its 2025 Best of Phoenix awards. The same stretch of Central feeds directly into the corridor's older dining institutions, Durant's steakhouse at 2611 N. Central has been serving since 1950, Pane Bianco turns out Chris Bianco's wood-fired focaccia sandwiches a few blocks away, and Postino on Central and Lux Central handle the wine-and-coffee end of things depending on the hour.
A few blocks off the path, Roadrunner Park has become the second stop in a lot of people's Saturday. The park's four public pickleball and tennis courts sit under permanent lines and night lighting, added when the park went through a full renovation, and they're free to use, no membership or court fee required. That matters more than it sounds like it should: pickleball participation has climbed 311 percent over the past three years nationally according to pickleheads.com, and free, well-lit public courts are still the exception rather than the rule in most Valley neighborhoods. Roadrunner runs its own weekly farmers market too, giving residents a second version of the same morning without ever getting in the car.
Put together, that's a corridor where a resident can run the path, grab coffee at Uptown Farmers Market, play a set of pickleball at Roadrunner, and pick up produce again, all inside a couple of miles, all without needing Central Avenue's actual traffic lanes for anything but crossing the street. It's a genuinely well-built Saturday. It's just built on top of infrastructure that hasn't caught up to it.
That gap is why a Change.org petition started circulating in 2024, asking the city to reduce Central Avenue to one traffic lane in each direction between Bethany Home and the Canal, add a dedicated bike lane, and extend the bridle path and its surrounding green space north across the canal. The petition leans on a specific safety figure from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, that pedestrian deaths account for 17 percent of all traffic fatalities nationwide, to argue the current setup asks too much of a dirt path never engineered for the volume for mixed foot and bike traffic it now carries.
As of this year, there's no indication the city has acted on either the lane reconfiguration or the extension. The path still stops at the canal. Central still runs four lanes with no bike lane. The petition is a resident-driven document, not a funded city project, and it's worth reading that way: as a real, current conversation inside the neighborhood rather than a settled outcome. What it tells you, though, is that the people who use this corridor every week have already identified the same friction point that a stroller-and-cyclist Saturday morning makes obvious. The path works. It's the infrastructure around it that hasn't been asked to catch up.
That's the piece worth knowing if you already live along Central Avenue and treat this stretch as background scenery. The Murphy Bridle Path isn't a finished amenity quietly preserved as a historic curiosity. It's a 130-year-old solution to a horse-traffic problem, still doing its job for a very different kind of traffic, with its own neighbors now the ones asking what comes next.
If you're weighing a move within the corridor, curious what a specific block's proximity to the path or Roadrunner Park actually does for day-to-day life, or just want a second set of eyes on how a property here compares to others along Central, The Phil Tibi Group knows this stretch of North Central Phoenix block by block. Get the Biltmore Market in Your Pocket.
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