Is It Time For A Shakeup In The MTB World?

It would be interesting to know the carbon footprint of a days uplift at BPW !

So lots of people drove from various parts of the country to talk about making a sport that never has and never will be green. Oh the irony. If anything the sport is becoming less green every year with the rise of e-bikes that are not being used to replace car journeys but just as more toys. The sooner we stop pretending this sport is anything other than harmful to the emotions on all levels the better

I think the desire for a less environmentally impactful version of off-road cycling is kind of being met by Gravel these days as it’s just happened to land at the right time to act as a crossover between road/touring/bike packaging/adventure (from the door). I know my own from the door default tends to be curly bars these days.

I just don’t think MTB ‘culture’ (led mainly by the bigger marketing departments) is really focussed on selling sustainability or environmental considerations. E-MTBs are the big thing currently for them and those are mainly sold on delivering more fun per pedal stroke than anything else (cos nobody can claim they’re any better for the environment and keep a straight face).

The thing that I think would help tremendously is still being able to do those big trips/holidays with a bike, but without using cars and planes so much. I’ll admit as soon as a group of us start planning anything the question is always “who’s driving? Where should we fly from?” not “can we do this by train?”

That is probably more of an indictment of how wider society is set-up (or not) to facilitate sustainable transport with a bicycle, but we’re all trained to default to cars and planes now. The alternatives are seen as complex, inconvenient and costly (because they often are), you fix MTB’s biggest sustainability issue by fixing a far bigger problem with society (IMO of course).

How many car trips are equal to the planes I’ve not sat on for 12 years? I know people who fly rens of thousands of miles to sit in the sun, then fly back.

Or how many car commutes equal my drive to Fod? I work from home and have for the last 3 years

of off-road cycling is kind of being met by Gravel these days

I disagree it’s just another niche that’s having its moment to sell more bikes. Most have similar geometries to 10 year old hardtails so you could have just used one of those

Once you start thinking about this, you can just keep going deeper and deeper.

If I stop driving my electric car (charged from renewables) to Hope and everyone else stopped going there, the village itself would suffer as it would be unable to support the shops it has with just the locals. They then start driving towards Sheffield for the things they can no longer get locally.

Just playing devil’s advocate. It’s a far more complex question than most give it credit for and there are no simple answers.

I guess it’s down to what you ride, but speaking personally, 80% of our MTB riding is still either from the door, or within 20 mins drive from home and, races and holidays excepting, it’s unusual for us to drive a long way just to go for a ride. On the road bikes, it’s even more extreme and, races aside, we almost never ride anything other than from the house.

That said, I know plenty of people who used to ride like this, but now wouldn’t entertain getting out the MTBs for anything other than a “proper trail centre”, which generally involves at least a 1-2 hour drive from home. In fact, I’ve more or less given up trying to get them out on local rides any more, which is their loss more than mine.

Personally, I think the drive to more capable bikes and many that are “descending focused” has led to a mindset that a traditional, local XC route has nothing to offer them any more, which is a real shame. My son rides with a large and ever-changing group of peers and it’s astonishing to me just how few of them will (or even can!) ride back up the hills to the top of the next descending trail. Again, a mindset that MTB is all about the down and not the up any more.

Is it time…. what took them so long when this stuff was obvious over 15 years ago. Rather than the mindless consequence free consumerism that appears to be normalised now, we could have had a situation where if one had invested in a product, it could be usable 10-20 years down the line.. not made obsolete as soon as the next must have tripe comes along. The best thing about cycling, is that can be an awesome activity to do that is also really low impact, anything that takes it in a direction away from that doesn’t get my vote.

Yep – a lot gets made of a football team taking a private jet to and from their matches but no-one seems to say much about 50,000 fans driving the length and breadth of the country each time there’s a match on.

Very much this – so many of the working forests absolutely rely on the income from car parking; the forestry works themselves don’t cover the full costs so their economic model relies on supplements from people coming to their (remote, far from public transport) venue to walk, cycle and so on.

It’s entirely possible to be green and mountain bike. I live in a city, the bulk of my MTB rides are from the door. People have got very lazy and don’t seem to be willing to ride to the trails.

Emtbs are not the answer. They’re a waste of the world’s resources with a negative environmental impact.

In other countries, you can use public transport easily to go and ride. Last time I was in Switzerland you just got on a train, no booking, with your bike to all the places you’d want to ride a bike. Even in somewhere as capitalist as Canada, all the car club cars in Vancouver have a bike rack. You’d need to improve the public transport system but it’s possible to do here.

People do need to take a good hard look at themselves. You probably don’t need an e bike, unless you’ve got some serious problems. You definitely don’t need a massive van. You don’t need to drive to every ride. But every bugger has an excuse for why they are happy to contribute to climate change, and it will ultimately boil down to “I’m too lazy and selfish”.

The one sentence out of almost 2,200 words – sorry, I actually copy and pasted the text so I could do a word count as it seemed an extraordinarily long article  for an online read – that made sense was the line from the Trek guy which reads:

“Consumerism and disposability are the two greatest issues, neither of which can we cycle our way out of, and no matter how many trees you plant, keeping your current bike will always be a better option than buying a new one.”

We need to stop making more and more stuff and stop pretending that somehow making the stuff we make marginally more sustainable somehow will make it all okay. The solution is way beyond a single small  leisure industry’s agency.

gets made of a football team taking a private jet to and from their matches but no-one seems to say much about 50,000 fans driving the length and breadth of the country each time there’s a match on.

I was thinking about the thousands of amateur participants or kids that get ferried to their crappy 20 minute-a-half 7-a-side match each weekend. Didn’t even think about the spectators.

Last time I was in the UK I walked across to the next village to watch my nephew get beaten play against another local team. The car park was heaving.

This isn’t a pissing contest. Riders, generally mtber are just as bad as anyone else. At least roadies generally ride from their front door.

I live in a city

So do I and it’s rare for me to ride within an hours drive from home. Tomorrow my friends and I will drive upto the Peak District for our weekly ride. It’s about  an hour each way

I guess we can’t go back to the pre pneumatic days, the wooden frames would help “save the planet” but we wouldn’t be allowed to have the iron tyres. I dunno, take up horse riding?

Is It Time For A Shakeup In The MTB World?

No. Per person, and including riding equipment, MTBing has a lower footprint than most/all event based sports.

Do you have any idea how much energy it costs to run a stadium, a gym or a swimming pool? All of those are on top of the cost of millions of people worldwide actually getting to them, several times per week.

Whilst I agree we should all try to think about our impact, talking about MTBing emissions is just sucking the air from more important, more impactful considerations.

Agree with the comments about having a sense of scale or proportion here. Riding a bike can be about as low impact and high personal benefits as a passtime can be, apart from walking maybe.

Main thing that bugs me is the way outdoor sport marketing and cultures are about destinations more than what’s on our doorstep. Flying and driving to participate is the biggest factor in all this at a personal level; on the bike industry side it’s probably overseas manufacturing and the travel and logistics or shipping involved.

Wonder what the carbon footprint of Hardline Tasmania was for our entertainment?

I wonder about the environmental cost of golf…

I was never attracted to MTB because I thought it was a green sport.
But as it turns out it has lead me to being more green.

I think that mountain biking, and walking, trail running etc, can play a part in helping folk appreciate their natural environment, even if it’s not now all “natural”. If you are restricted to living in a city then talk of forests, moors, rewilding and so on can seek very esoteric. There’s been lots of chat in here about the likes of the Cairngorm funicular or the Yr Wyddfa train but they definitely had a role to play in showing some folk what a mountain environment could look and, maybe even a little, developing an appreciation of why some of that needs to be preserved.

Of course, most MTB facilities are almost the opposite of this. The concentration of bike development towards downhill isn’t currently encouraging mountain bikers to go exploring outwith commercial forestry. A long time ago, one of the aims of DMBinS was exactly this, based on setting up longer signposted routes from the various trail centres as a sort of transition. One of their many failed notions.

It’s already been said in this thread, but maybe this is where Gravel bikes are finding a place, with some of the longer events being a good place to start..

The title here is about a shake up in the MTB world. There are lots of good points in this thread but many aren’t within control of the MTB community or industry. For example the obvious problems around bikes on trains. Although of course these things can be lobbied for.

Sadly I think the magazines are part of the culture of redundancy. I literally wouldn’t know that my bikes geometry was out of date without reading this forum or the magazine. Because the one place it’s not obvious is when riding it.

I’m going to give a shout out to the world of “gravel” and the over lapping area of “bike packing”. I normally ride from the door mixing up minor roads and rights of way. It’s something I enjoy and I really appreciate that this sort off riding is back in vogue with YouTube videos, threads on here and Facebook groups. The shape of the bars you use for these rides seems irrelevant. The key is that most people can ride like this locally.