It’s hard to not give at least four stars to any decent park or trail. The Erie Canal Towpath trail is a local treasure because it is well maintained and accessible to so many folks from many neighborhoods spots. Expect the amounts of people sharing the trail to increase with better weather and the typical common exercise times, but rarely does it create problems as most users are fairly decent about being aware and alert. You are more likely to encounter a problem with an obstinate duck than an inconsiderate human, but both do exist. If third is a drawback it is that the trail is not a park in the more common sense of that word and there are not regular facilities for water or bathrooms. A few of the connected parks(Perinton’s Town Hall Park for example) and sometimes the locks, do have some facilities, like port a johns but they are sometimes moved or gone. While the vast majority of the trail is crushed stone but in the villages is switched over to asphalt. Depending on which segment you are on the trail gets pretty regular maintenance as far as mowing and grading, and in some cases even snow removal(mostly just inside the Villages). While groups regularly crew on the water. Swimming IN the canal is prohibited. And given that most segments of the waterway in the Rochester area are not co-opted natural bodies of water, but man-made ditches they have no natural flow of current, and are basically pools of water that have urban/suburban runoff, combined with the allowed dumping of sewage by the private boats that«cruise» the canal it really seems IMO to be wiser to not get IN the water.
