This, from today’s LA Times: Mountain bikers are still unwelcome on many L.A. trails
A comprehensive update of the city’s bicycle plan still gives precedence to hikers and equestrians.

The LA Times article is focused on trails in Los Angeles, but is representative of a much wider access issue across California, where in too many instances trails that are perfectly sound from an environmental perspective are closed to bikes.

As someone who hikes and bikes and grew up riding horses, I understand the frustration that different trail user groups can have with each other. And I like having trails all to myself just like anyone else. But for the most part, I think excluding user groups from trails, and especially “wilderness” areas, is short sighted.

Having multi-user trails (horse, hike, bike) should in theory mean that there are that many more advocacy groups to: (1) defend our ability to get out into wild spaces and (2) fight for policies that preserve them. Instead, we’ve split what should be a strong wilderness and outdoors constituency, and guys like me who live for the outdoors refuse to give to groups like the Sierra Club because they are anti-bike in far too many instances. In the end, that’s a loss to all user groups. The anti-wilderness and pro-development forces on the other side can only be too happy.

The reasons often used cited as pretext to keep trails closed to bikers are mentioned in the LA times article: the potential to scare other user groups, and damage the trails.

In the long run, decisions to exclude bikes from trails because of the potential to scare other trail users create a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Here in San Diego, because so much of the good single track is closed to bikers, the few trails that are truly multi-user become magnets for all of the bikers in the area. As a result, hikers and equestrians feel overwhelmed, and even more sure in their conviction that other areas should remain closed. But in the end, there are just too many examples across the country of well managed trail systems that welcome all three user groups to think that exclusion is the answer. It can and does work.

If a user group does have to be excluded, then it should be done on the basis of good science and sound land management principles. And yet we have groups like the Pacific Crest Trail Association who claim that “The damage caused by a mountain biker is much greater than that caused by a hiker or horse because, with a bike, the soil is impacted continuously along the trail, while a hiker’s or horse’s feet hit the soil only at intervals.” Anyone who has ridden a trail frequented by horses knows this is not true. The PCTA’s position, and the decision to exclude bikes from the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail, are about as scientific as creationism.

I don’t mean for this to come off as anti-horse. Again, more user groups fighting together for the same trails could be a win-win. But I can’t accept closing trails to bikers, but keeping them open to horses under the pretext that bikers do more damage to trails. In most instances, decisions to allow horses but not bikes are based more on the romance and history of horses than science and sound land management principles. Horses were here long before bikes, right?

But perhaps more importantly, equestrians have money and attend important land management meetings. And that’s where I and others like me need to step up, since I’ve mostly neglected my chances to make my voice heard at different trail advocacy and land management meetings since moving to San Diego. It’s one of my goals in 2011 to get more active on that front, and to help more with trail work.