In our first two pieces on the state of access for mountain bikers, we covered the current access situation and what we think is wrong with it and we’ve started to talk about how we should progress. However, there may be a large white elephant in the room that noone wants to talk about.
Chris Porter begins:
“I’ve been waiting for years to read a well thought out piece on access rights to trails.
After two articles in Singletrack from ‘yer man’, I’ve still been waiting for years to read a well thought out piece on access rights to trails!
Divide and conquer.
It’s not walkers against cyclists against horse riders against horse and cart drivers (a new designation of legal trail!) against motorcycles against 4x4s.
It’s not that.
It’s us against them, ‘us’ being the trail using public, ‘them’ being the landowners who don’t want us to access their land. It’s as simple as that, divide and conquer. Stand back and watch the separate interest groups close down each other’s access. Encourage them to create interest groups. Jeeesus, we’ve got three or four different ones for MTBs alone!
The correct response to ‘we won’t listen to your requests unless you first form a representative group and then elect someone to talk to us’ should be: ‘Well screw you then, I’m happy riding the trails down which I can squeeze my sorry ass/MTB/horse/enduro bike/Land Crusier, etc…’
A 4×4 uses the same access law to access a BOAT ‘Byway Open To All Traffic’ as a cyclist uses to drive on the tarmac road to Afan (or to work) or a ‘Rambler’ (and there’s a veiled insult if ever there was one – rambler!) to drive to the Lakes…
The pernicious CROW Act from 2000 and the subsequent NERC passed in 2006 (some of the parts of the 2000 Act were only to be enacted in 2006, go figure?) between them allowed the government/landowners to deny massive groups of users access to a whole raft of trails. Whilst it’s mostly true that MTBs haven’t lost a lot of access rights due to these changes, some councils (mine included) have somehow used this opportunity to reclassify further still so that some RUPPs and Cart tracks have been downgraded to footpath status.
Incidentally, some of your readers will live along what used to be classified as RUPPs because there were thousands upon thousands of miles of them. Those people relied on that old access right to be able to walk, ride or drive to their homes. Now (look it up…), only the owner or lessee is allowed to access the property via the newly restricted bridleway route.
Technically, driving a car to visit a friend on a farm or in a cottage accessed via a restricted bridleway is breaking the same law as a motorcycle or 4×4 on a newly closed trail. We should be opening more access not applauding when some other user group gets access rights closed down.
The situation in which the reclassification has left us is a joke.
I can understand why no-one likes an illegal motorcyclist on a loud, illegal MX tearing across open ground or worse still tearing down a trail they should not be on causing confrontation. But that’s already illegal. Changing the law to restrict access to motorcycles and 4x4s in a blanket fashion does not make that selfish act any more illegal.
Because the perpetrator is already breaking 10 or 12 laws why would he think this new one is the one that makes him stop? What it does is to effectively remove law abiding pressure groups campaigning for access (for all!). It will also force loads more off road motorcyclists and 4×4 drivers to break the law, effectively beaching them at the end of a ‘legal trail’ faced with a choice of turn around (not always possible on a narrow trail) or carry on down the newly re-classified section? Want to check what’s legal and what’s not?
Simply pop down your local council office and have a look at the ‘definitive map’, remember an ordnance survey is NOT the definitive map. Most councils haven’t got a definitive map yet, the ones that have ask you to make an appointment to see it and there isn’t a facility to actually see across council boundaries! You’ll have to go and see their map as well! Encouraging law abiding access or discouraging law abiding access? You decide.
By(the)way, ‘mechanically propelled vehicles’ – it won’t be long before we’re trail centre only then? Trail centres = ‘permissive access’… Bollocks, should have teamed up with LARA, TRF, Ramblers, etc…
Divide and conquer.
By(the)way2, I saw a horse and cart on a trail for the first time in 30+ years of using trails, he was on a fire road, er, illegally! As I probably was also (on a MTB), does it matter?
Funny that they don’t have the police manpower to police the Fox-hunting ban (a piece of law which was promised for 3 full parliaments) so they simply ignore it and allow the toffs to carry on running rampant over the countryside NOT following bridleways either! Yet they have found enough manpower to have dedicated ‘off-road’ teams in every sodding police Constabulary. They’ve even had helicopters out after motorbikes in South Wales. How long till we get fines as MTBers do in the States?
The cretin that emailed in saying he doesn’t worry about the law but worries about impact. For f**k’s sake! The M4 to Wales vs a 4×4 on the ridgeway? The A66 vs a sneaky enduro bike on the Pennines. What’s going to revert back to nature sooner? Impact? Western Lifestyle?
I guess that by impact he means erosion, er, erosion is how the currently dry bits of the planet got lumpy? It doesn’t matter. No really, it doesn’t matter… Which bit of this sceptered isle is still untouched by human intervention? Which bit is so sacrosanct that some mining or utility company doesn’t already own the mineral/water rights to it? You know the answer – get a grip…
Impact? Don’t talk to me about impact! Bikes and components from Taiwan? Shipped over in a rattan container on a wooden tea clipper I suppose. I should calm down I’ll get a coronary… It’s OK for me to break the law because I’ve decided I have less impact than the guy on the KTM, ergo, it’s not OK for him to break the law? That’s a bit inquisition isn’t it? Blah, go back to school.
People who talk about the ‘unsuitability’ of 4x4s and motorbikes using trails designed for horse and carts should remember that
a) most of our access rights in law date from after the invention of the internal combustion engine
b) whose land is it anyway? Act of “I’ll fight your for it!”
And c) ‘chaps’ like T E Lawrence (of Arabia) were happily thraping their Brough Superiors along these dirt tracks before tarmac was even widespread!
Long before Cormac Macarthy, this is T E Lawrence and ‘The Road’…
“Boa is a top-gear machine, as sweet in that as most single-cylinders in middle. I chug lordlily past the guard-room and through the speed limit at no more than sixteen. Round the bend, past the farm, and the way straightens. Now for it. The engine’s final development is fifty-two horsepower. A miracle that all this docile strength waits behind one tiny lever for the pleasure of my hand.
“Another bend: and I have the honour of one of England’s straightest and fastest roads. The burble of my exhaust unwound like a long cord behind me. Soon my speed snapped it, and I heard only the cry of the wind which my battering head split and fended aside. The cry rose with my speed to a shriek: while the air’s coldness streamed like two jets of iced water into my dissolving eyes. I screwed them to slits, and focused my sight two hundred yards ahead of me on the empty mosaic of the tar’s gravelled undulations.”
“…Over the first pot-hole Boanerges screamed in surprise, its mud-guard bottoming with a yawp upon the tyre. Through the plunges of the next ten seconds I clung on, wedging my gloved hand in the throttle lever so that no bump should close it and spoil our speed…
“A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocations, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring smoothness. Because Boa loves me, he gives me five more miles of speed than a stranger would get from him.”
Why is it great that the mass trespass happened to open up footpaths and bad that a mass trespass happens every single weekend because the pressure on our legal trail system is so overwhelming…?
I would like to say I agreed with the writers point of view whilst disagreeing with his argument. Unfortunately this piece was so poorly argued that it was incoherent.
Not sure why everyone worries so much about this? What the worst thats going to happen, an angry farmer, big deal.
Don’t care, will never care about the signs or the land owners (most land is owned by the tax avoiding monarchy and aristocratic oligarchs) who deserve no respect.
Ride anywhere, just be respectful of other tresspassers on foot and horse!
I think it’s good that we should start thinking outside of mere ‘access for mountain bikers’ – the whole system is badly biased against free access and regardless of whether you think Chris is ranting or not, he has an extremely valid point.
“The cretin that emailed in saying he doesn’t worry about the law but worries about impact”
[waves] 😀
Blame it on the Normans!
Silver Machine the cannondale enduros looked great and were ahead of there time in some respects.Only problem soon as they got cover in mud they went pop.£7000 for an enduro bike 5 or 6 years ago was crazy.Nearly wrecked the company.Mind on the other hand they make a Quad which is great and they cant make enough of them funny old world.
There seems to a lot of confusion on the issue of access. I agree with the writer that landowners want everyone off, they will use the access rules avaialble to do this, we are the easy hit.
As I understand access, you can ride anywhere, but have the “right” to bridleways and higher status tracks. Not having the “right” is not the same as not being allowed to or being illegal. The “right” gives us protection in law from the landowners. No-one other than the landowner can ask to leave the land, Ramblers should know better.
It is only illegal, and an offence that could involve the police, to ride on footpaths, these being pavements at the side of the road, this misundersatnding is probably the source of a lot of the indignation from other usergroups
If it had been all non-motorised users need to band together I think he’d have been pretty spot but I really can’t ally with the motorised users. There is a tipping point to what’s sustainable (socially and environmentally), from my view point it very much comes down to engine vs no engine.
I too gave up before the end.
It’s articles like this that mean my STW “Forums” button gets far more use than the “Home” button 🙁
What PTR said.
What a contrast to the well-reasoned articles by Dave. The charming Mr Porter calls a contributor a “cretin” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretinism]. Porter’s boorish attitude dilutes any value in his “article”. He’s just a guy that fixes suspension and I’m surprised Singletrack has published such vulgar drivel. Post your nonsense on the forum like the rest of us Porter.
I suspect he just wants to rag his motorbikes over Welsh mountains with impunity. I hope the helicopter gunships get him [joke].
I have to ask Singletrack:
Is this written by Mr Mojo?
If it wasn’t, would you have published it?
Jon, this isn’t a discussion on RoW access, it’s a discussion about a crap article that you’ve published.
Very, very surprised that you’ve allied yourselves with this badly written and clearly biased unresearched article.
This should have been published on the Forum, not your Home page.
The sceptical answers above have restored my faith in Singletrack and the mtb world at large. For a while I was afraid I was the only person who thought it was utter bobbins. This is what the world will be like if audio dication becomes reliable and cheap.
As far as I can decipher it, this article makes a few points:
– Banning motorised traffic is the thin end of the wedge and will inevitably result in a situation where, a few years hence, we will only be allowed to ride in velodromes.
– A vociferous and well-organised lobby of mountain bikers opposes every attempt to get access opened up for motorised users.
– All landowners are chinless toffs who want you off their grounds.
– It doesn’t matter how much damage 4x4s cause to trails, the Earth’s going to be swallowed by the Sun in a few years anyway.
Not really convinced, sorry.
WTF?
More of a Trojan horse than the elephant in the room. Thought I’d by mistake stumbled on Trail Rider Magazine’s web site for a second. Northwind wins. . beside any fool knows many councils definitive maps are going online and no need to go anywhere near their offices.. check out oxford and hants. .not that they are much interest to read
Begging your pardon, but didn’t diverse user groups get together and force a major rethink in the FC sell off debate? This was largely about access to permissive paths. The first point about divide and conquer is a good one and we shouldn’t overlook it, despite the polemic that follows…
For an organisation (singletrack) that imagines itself to be at the forefront of debates regarding mountain biking and access, you could at least try and find someone who is well-informed and capable enough to sustain a coherent and thoughtful argument on these issues. Frankly it’s an embarrassment to the magazine and mountain biking more widely if you can’t do better than publish this dross.
I’ve been following the articles both online and in the magazine about improving access for cycling. Like everyone here I’d like to see open access, like the system in Scotland and I’m sure I’m not the only one here who’d be happy to do what I can to move things forward. However, reading these articles and the comments that follow I’ve become increasingly unsure where I’ allowed to ride at the moment. All of which leads me to ask if it would be possible for someone to get in touch with a ROW officer to clarify the current system and to then post this in a proper article please?
I liked this latest artical, to me it points out that all countryside users are loosing out. I used to do loads of Green Laneing on my motorbike as well as ride my mtb.
Each seprate group is / has been severly restricted and the trend contiues.
Easy. Just an inevitable consequence of unfettered capitalism.