The Betasso Management Plan is out, with proposals for new mountain-bike accessible trails. The plan is a pretty good result when you take a macro view.
However, the plan perpetuates the Wednesday and Saturday bike closure at Betasso and extends that closure to the proposed trails. The time is right for you, the BMA Membership and the Boulder County cycling community, to express your personal views on this and the greater issue of excluding bikes from multi-use trails. The two-day closures addressed a real problem, user-conflict on the trails. The solution was unfair and reinforced the status of bicyclists as second-class citizens on our public lands.
BMA has been good partners with the people at BCPOS, and we really want to continue that relationship. But after attending the open house on March 24, it was made clear to us that staff felt that the current practice of excluding bikes on Wednesday and Saturday 'was working and there were no plans on changing it'. Both staff and management don't understand why we feel like 'second class citizens' because of this exclusion.
BMA has always taken a position of "shared use" as the best way to protect the resource. By putting everyone on the same trails, we can minimize the ecological footprint of trail systems on the land. Sharing trails builds a community of users. Bicyclists may now be the largest group of users on BCPOS trails. We pay taxes, take care of the trails, and contribute to society as much as any other user. Should cyclists be the only ones to bear the brunt of capacity problems caused by the increasing popularity of trail recreation on lands adjacent to a growing, urban population?
There is a subset of users who do not want to see a bike when they visit open space. Perhaps this is selfishness, or a belief that bikes don't belong on open-space singletracks, or an experience with rude cyclists, or just a reaction to sheer volumes of users. Regardless, the solutions to user-conflict must be fair and equitable. IMBA has demonstrated a conflict-solution program that goes from least intrusive to most, and the two-day exclusion is at the most end of the scale. Many other actions are available to reach the managers' goal of peace on the trail. We share that goal. We want a broader, better array of management tools to get there.
Boulder County needs to address user-conflict by treating bicyclists as equal partners on the public lands. A solution that just excludes us, giving nothing in return, and exacting nothing from other groups, perpetuates this old, unfortunate division of classes on Boulder's open space lands.
So, there it is. If you want to address the practice of using exclusion and separated use to BCPOS, NOW is the time to do it.
What To Do
