If you have lived in Palmer Ranch for more than a season, your default routes are set. Whole Foods means a run up to University Town Center. A long walk on the Legacy Trail means dodging cyclists at the busier trailheads. A ride north stops, functionally, where Fruitville Road cuts across the corridor.

Three separate projects finished or advanced this spring, and together they change all three of those defaults. Read them individually and they look like unrelated municipal updates. Read them together and the practical footprint of a Palmer Ranch summer looks different than it did a year ago.

The trail near Pompano finally split in two

On March 31, Sarasota County cut the ribbon on the first phase of a bifurcated section of the Legacy Trail Extension, a parallel six-foot-wide asphalt strip reserved for walkers and joggers.