Are there too many trails now?

No. The reason facilities aren't maintained is because there's no funding available, because not enough is allocated to local authorities from central government.  Budget for leisure facilities get cut, and here we are.

Yes. We have a selfish amount. Go to any MTB venue and not only will it be over used but the over spill will be awful. It goes along quite nicely with the article about MTBing be green or not. Most people don't give a toss really.

No.

And what Molgrips said.

Weren't a lot of UK tail centres funded through EU schemes?

We balance it out here in Wirral by having not 1m of MTB trail.

I don't think we have enough personally but I like riding my bike and I like new places so why wouldn't I think that?

The issue isn't too many new trails it's too little funding.

I almost completely avoid public trails as they are maintained less than a badgers merkin.

NRW in particular have a set and forget attitude, there are large sections at Afan which have been almost unrideable for years and are becoming proper dangerous.

Public bodies have shown they have no idea how to sustainably manage sports and recreation facilities.

No I don’t think so

I use to worry a tiny bit at Woburn that the spread of trails was having a negative environmental impact. Particularly round the beech trees. But it turns out these are a crop too. One day I arrived and all the beech had been chopped down. Towering trees which were over 30 m high gone and replaced by ruts that were chest deep.

Places like Woburn which are close to populations centres offers a sustainable future for MTB

In my opinion there are not too many trails. I prefer to ride wild and remote trails or paths though. I do think there's probably an unwillingness amongst many mtbers to accept responsibility for the state of trails we ride on. The prevalence of "strava lines" being one example

So when does the creation of new trails become too much, and should we be thinking about reducing and repairing rather than building?

I see what you’re getting at, but I’d hazard a guess that the individuals who build trails to a good standard probably aren’t the same people who want to ride at a trail centre.

getting volunteers organized to maintain  a publicly funded trail would be a a big task. getting materials and the access to move them to where they are needed to make the repairs would also be difficult. Likewise getting the tools in.

a “friends of the 7 stanes” type club would be a good place to start, I guess. Do members of the public have the legal right to repair trail centre trails?

You can never have too many trails!!

Seriously, though, good design and build at the outset should see trails survive for longer. The original Red Bull trail at Coed-y-Brenin is still very rideable and probably more attractive with age...

The old BMX track that I am repurposing as a 4 Cross track at the moment is an example of what happens too often. There was a campaign to get a BMX track and the council spend quite a lot of money building a good 500m track with big jumps and berms. It was used and maintained by a club for a while until the main Dad there left and then it was left to the council to maintain. They did standard maintenance of cutting the grass 8 times a year. Strangely it deteriorated.

Public bodies have shown they have no idea how to sustainably manage sports and recreation facilities.

Of course they do, they just have absolutely no money. Did you not notice this?

They seem to go for funding to build new stuff but there is never any scope for funding to maintain stuff...so all the big projects are all brilliant when first done but very quickly they stop being as brilliant as there is no funding plan in place to maintain. With the volume of use a new trail sees, maintenance should be a standard piece of planning to be included.
Funding isn't available and current available funds won't stretch to include maintenance of new trails (never mind existing trails).
I love new trails but I do think it isn't great as there is no maintenance package for them so once they start needing work they decline for a while before something gets done; which I think is a shame.

The maintenance of trails is quite a specialist skill and councils cannot afford permeant trail maintenance teams. New builds are done by contractors. I worked hard with Southampton BIke Park to build up a community groups of riders to do the maintenance and over 10 years later it is still well maintained. The council would only commit to cutting the grass on the flat areas and we had to fight to get a rubbish bin put there to be emptied twice a week.

Maybe a proliferation of badly built cheeky for sure.

OK- in an ideal world the funding would be there, but it isn't so little can be done about that.

I think I should have clarified that I meant trail centres in the main- cheeky/off-piste/natural trails pose a different set of issues.

The suggestion of a "friends of the 7 stanes" club is great, but the Glentress trailfairies, who did a huge amount of volunteer work at Glentress are effectively closed due to FLS policy (no work unless supervised by FLS staff, who don't have time)

It always makes me slightly uncomfortable that trail centres have more than their fair share of nice cars/vans parked up, full of people that have burnt half a tank or more of fuel to get there and are riding multiple thousand pound 'steads' - but pay little to nothing to ride the trails (specifically trail centre trails)

You'd not want to price people out of riding (you could be local and you could be riding a £100 2nd hand bike) but a more altruistic approach to paying what the experience is worth might make the experience even better (or still there) next time you visit. I know its a different level of maintenance, but look what golfists pay for a round. Look what you pay to swim in a pool.

The suggestion of a “friends of the 7 stanes” club is great, but the Glentress trailfairies, who did a huge amount of volunteer work at Glentress are effectively closed due to FLS policy (no work unless supervised by FLS staff, who don’t have time)

It's not policy as such, it's just lack of staff resources, however now things are returning returning to normal after the past few years of upheaval, there are plans for Trailfairy sessions to resume soon. And there will be other volunteer opportunities before then, which won't be supervised by FLS staff.

Good posts here, as ever it boils down to:

It's always easier to get money and resource for new trails than for maintenance
If you actually built in true maintenance costs into new trail investment it'd more often than not mean no trails at all because suddenly your million quid doesn't go very far.
New trails tend to attract more new users than maintenance
(and this is a vicious circle, because the less resource you have for maintanence, the more you have to try and make your trails low maintenance, which makes them many times more expensive to build and generally leads to less interesting trails)
People complain when you fix stuff but also complain when you don't
Some riders do way more damage than others
Most people have no conception of what's involved in building a bike trail, or maintaining it, let alone a heavy-use, graded one which has to be kept to its grade. And so they often tend to assume it's easier than it is, cheaper than it is, and that wear and tear is some sort of reprehensible failure rather than just a reality.
Hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of trail investment, thousands of man hours, can get put beyond use by a single storm, and that tends to happen to a whole lot of trails all at the same time. Add tree disease to that. This is goign to get a lot worse

Probably most importantly and most problematically of all, trail centres and trail developments generate an enormous amount of money and very little of it ever gets back to the trails or to the organisations who invested in the trails. And this last one is where it gets most brutal and most twisted. How dare you put up a barrier and ask me to pay £6 to ride my £10000 bike on your million pound trails? How dare you, an event organiser that brings thousands of people into this town and supports every shop, restaurant and hotel, ask for anything back from them? etc etc.

So it's absolutely self-sustaining at this point.

Are there too many? Probably. Will stopping building new ones have a positive effect on old ones? Only a little, not enough.

What's the fix? Isn't one. Sorry. The only way to actually un**** it is at an impractically high level, we need local and national government to invest in the golden geese. This isn't a "there is no money" problem, because it's a net gain, it's a "we don't see why we should spend the money we have to protect the revenue we gain, because we never have before and it's not all collapsed yet".

But the average rider doesn't really grasp the problem so I don't really expect struggling councils etc to handle it either.

convert - I completely agree.  I'm an avid "Land Reform Act" advocate but the concept that something is built specifically for a purpose (in some cases largely to the exclusion of other land users) and then provided free is not what the Land Reform Act set out to do... and that people pretend to be doing something green having driven there in their cars is even more ironic.  Of course, there may well be an argument that exercise is good for us all and therefore it should be funded - but that's a central government/health pot (or an economic one for the productivity upside) not a local government or forestry one.

still if charging would make those people all go to "free" trails that might not be ideal either - extra erosion, getting in my way!, conflict with other groups etc...

and that people pretend to be doing something green having driven there in their cars is even more ironic

This gets brought up over and over again, but I can't see it's anything other than a complete myth.  I think people go biking because they like biking. I strongly doubt they are patting themselves on the back for being green.. you lot on the other hand are patting yourselves on the back for moaning about other people patting themselves on the back.

The issue is not that there are too many trails, it's that there are so many people using them that they wear out so fast. It also stops the old cycle of trails falling in and out of use at different times of year, places like the FOD used to have these all over the place. Winter trails would become overgrown in the summer, summer trails would be avoided in the winter as they were bogs etc. Now there are lots of riders who don't understand how some trails suit particular times of year so they all get ridden all the time now.

Weren’t a lot of UK tail centres funded through EU schemes?

The Welsh ones certainly were, from the initial build to ongoing maintenance. The Welsh Govt did manage to 'secure' a similar amount of funding from Westminster but that was rescinded and diverted to the Levelling Up fund pot instead and hasn't been seen since.

IME, maintenance is now reactive instead of proactive, it's not just trails either, hence why we have so many badly filled potholes.

Can't see how this is going to change anytime soon, especially with council spending cuts, and material cost rises.

IMO building trails away from conurbations was a good idea to bring money to rural areas but not so good long term, due to the environment cost of people travelling back and forth. Plus their is less local people who can devote time in helping maintain and build trails.

It's no surprise that such a large network of trails at Glentress and Innerlethen - mostly built by volunteers - is relatively close to a biggish city and right next to villages/towns. Compare this to say Kirroughtree which is pretty isolated.

So, I'd like more trails, built closer to cities.

There's been talk of a trail centre in the Pentland hills for years but I've seen anything.

Or what about the hill ranges that are relatively close to Glasgow or Edinburgh like:

• Ochil Hills, east of Stirling.
• Kilpatrick Hills, north-west of Glasgow.
• Campsie Fells, north of Glasgow.
• Lomond Hills, east of Kinross.
• Pentlands, South of Edinburgh
• Trossachs, North of Glasgow

There's only really Carron Valley which is rather small. Nothing like on the scale of the 7 Stanes.

This gets brought up over and over again, but I can’t see it’s anything other than a complete myth.  I think people go biking because they like biking. I strongly doubt they are patting themselves on the back for being green.

Pretty much my take on MTBing being green, I can only assume some are conflating the genuinely green types of cycling such as utility/commuting, and applying the same thinking to something that clearly isnt green because it still involves bicycles.

@didnthurt

The Lomonds "had" a rider built Trail "centre" of sorts, some of it being lost to under use and the woodwork rotting away, that may not be the reason maintenance stopped, but that is what's happening.

Ochils, at the Eastern end at least, seems to be fairly well used for rider built trails.

As someone who's been building trail centre trails and more recently doing significant amounts of sustainable maintenance I have some insight here. One of the biggest issues is the way contractors build trails, usually just chucking down various grades of gravel and giving it a good whack. It's great for 6 months but as soon as the surface starts to go the trail collapses. When we build, by hand, we stone pitch a lot of it so even if the gravel wears and it will ,there's a solid base which stops further degradation. Thats how we repair as well so the repair lasts.

What is frustrating is the FC do generate income from trails via the parking but it doesn't get invested back into the trails. A 2 man team with minimal equipment can do an awful lot of trail repair and building across a number of sites.

The other problem is volunteers, must groups die out at some point, we've been going for 15 years which I is unusual. Mainly due to me acting as continuity. We don't have enough volunteers and the FC aren't great at working with volunteers either. Combine that with stupid decisions like condemning bridges that were formally approved three years ago when they replaced bridges of a similar construction that had stood for over 10 years with no issues or accidents and you're actively closing trails.

FC needs to wake up and protect the revenue if nothing else, trouble is most FC staff are tree farmers not recreation rangers despite their remit moving more and more in that direction.

They seem to go for funding to build new stuff but there is never any scope for funding to maintain stuff

This isn't limited to trail building or even the Public Sector TBH, just look around you at work or anywhere else - no one likes paying for or maintaining current stuff, everyone wants to be involved in the latest new shiny stuff.  Been like that for ever.

With trails, it's expensive, time-consuming and bureaucratic to maintain public trails whereas it's far easier to just go build new 'private' trails.

But.  I live & ride in the Tweed Valley and here we are trying to maintain too - some are organised via such as the TVTA but most are just folk like ourselves maintaining our own trails.  It's VERY time-consuming.  Storm Arwen took trees out of practically every trail in the valley, we're still clearing those along with all the subsequent 'unprotected' trees that have come down.

So, I’d like more trails, built closer to cities

Find a FC site you like and start building.  At some point they'll come and chop the trees down and you'll need to 'recover' the trails.

All the local (homebuilt) trails that have been built in the Calder Valley mean that I rarely have to drive very far, in fact I rarely drive at all.

As a family we still use trail centres and now bike parks too. We are more than happy to help pay for the upkeep and have also worked as volunteers at Stainburn and Dalby.

This isn’t limited to trail building or even the Public Sector TBH, just look around you at work or anywhere else – no one likes paying for or maintaining current stuff, everyone wants to be involved in the latest new shiny stuff. Been like that for ever.

Funding for Shiny New Things is Capital, often in the form of a grant specifically for it.
Apply for one of the numerous "levelling up funds", "leisure facilities funds" etc with your plan, Government throw £100,000 at you and you can build a nice pump track.

Maintenance of said new pump track is Revenue - that is it comes from council funds such as council tax and the proceeds from paid-for services. And councils no longer have enough of that. So the Shiny New Thing is (fairly) easy to fund. Looking after it - that's way down the list behind potholes, roads, libraries, social care....

It always makes me slightly uncomfortable that trail centres have more than their fair share of nice cars/vans parked up, full of people that have burnt half a tank or more of fuel to get there and are riding multiple thousand pound ‘steads’ – but pay little to nothing to ride the trails (specifically trail centre trails)

Even worse is the expensive cars and vans that park around the corner to avoid the £6 a day car parking fee!

Another issue is a lot of places don't get any of the money from car parking or the cafe to put towards trail maintenance and this starts a negative spiral. No money so trails don't get maintained, fewer visitors as trails not maintained so less money from car parking etc.

If wealthy middle class mountain bikers want to ride custom built trails they should bloody well pay for it. Most can't even be arsed to pay for parking at these places.

I'd rather government funding paid a care worker an extra couple of quid an hour than building a cool berm.

I’d rather government funding paid a care worker an extra couple of quid an hour than building a cool berm.

It's not an either/or scenario. You can do both - and well-funded, well-run leisure facilities are essential for getting kids into activities which keeps them healthy, helps them develop and so on - potentially mitigating some of the issues further down the line that require health and social care services to intervene.

You can do both – and well-funded, well-run leisure facilities are essential for getting kids into activities which keeps them healthy, helps them develop and so on

I don't disagree with that, but let's be honest a trail centre in the middle of nowhere isn't going to provide that. The users are the likes of us, not a school party from a deprived city estate.

I’d rather government funding paid a care worker an extra couple of quid an hour than building a cool berm.

But the money spent in Wales meant more not less money to fund social care

But the money spent in Wales meant more not less money to fund social care

How did that work then?

But the money spent in Wales meant more not less money to fund social care

Merthyr Tydfil A+E dept with the "BPW wing"?

I don’t disagree with that, but let’s be honest a trail centre in the middle of nowhere isn’t going to provide that. The users are the likes of us, not a school party from a deprived city estate.

As mentioned above, facilities like that put money into local economy.

And not all trails / trail centres need to be in the middle of nowhere:
Leeds Urban Bike Park is a brilliant facility - well-run, well-looked after, good community feel to it and always busy, loads of kids and families.
Philips Park (out the back of Manchester Velodrome) had lots of money spent on developing a trail centre and pump track there - sadly due to lack of maintenance it's all become a bit feral but for a while there were youth races there, school groups etc.
Plenty of opportunities for local facilities, you can put a pump track / skate park etc in the corner of many inner city parks if you want to. There's a really nice little pump track in the corner of some community playing fields in Ingleton, always loads of kids on that when I ride past (invariably on the road bike so I can't go on it. 🙁 )
https://www.thisisingleton.co.uk/places/ingleton-pump-track/

We're not talking about the installation of a Bike Park Wales, just some basic trails.

How dare you put up a barrier and ask me to pay £6 to ride my £10000 bike on your million pound trails?

The amount of very expensive cars with racks, parked in any nearby layby of any popular MTB trail head is shameful.

Public bodies have shown they have no idea how to sustainably manage sports and recreation facilities.

It's amazing how that local leisure centre that's been there for 40+ years, despite apparently being so poorly managed, is only facing closing now, eh? Same goes for the library, civic centres, youth clubs, mum and baby support groups, the community bus that takes the old folks to the shops etc etc, is the reason they're all going because they were poorly managed too?

I don’t think it’s a lack of money but how it is spent. Many trail centres have spent huge amounts of money on new trails and facilities but they aren’t aimed at mountain bikers. They are aimed at family days out

So, I’d like more trails, built closer to cities.

There’s been talk of a trail centre in the Pentland hills for years but I’ve seen anything.

Or what about the hill ranges that are relatively close to Glasgow or Edinburgh

Who'd be funding, building, managing and maintaining these? I remember going to a meeting with F&LS years ago, when they first bought up loads of the Kilpatrick Hills. The Ranger's face went chalk-white when someone mentioned Glentress type trails up there.
I kind of get the feeling that the Stanes trails were very much a product of their time and it's unlikely we'll see anything like them being built from scratch again. Maybe the futures in smaller scale, community group led development?

The amount of very expensive cars with racks, parked in any nearby layby of any popular MTB trail head is shameful

Maybe, although i think it is fairly well known or at least the impression is that you're paying for parking but that revenue isn't put back into trail creation or maintenance anyway so is it really that shameful?

It can sometimes feel like you're paying to use dilapidated trails and subsidising the building of new Zog trails or Gruffalo sculptures which just feels like you're having the piss taken out of you.

Would it be better if the car parks were full of 20 year old Citroens and Vauxhalls and not newer posher cars. Maybe they're driven by folks who have the time and resources for a newish vehicle and weekend trial riding as I'd guess they're probably not feeding and housing a family.