Recreation Must Pay – But It’s Everyone Who Will Suffer

But maybe you’ve been too lazy to find them? ?

I’m too lazy to even ride anymore! 🙂

And since when have secret trails been a new thing?

And since when have secret trails been a new thing?

I actually think they’re mostly just a thing for YouTube titles these days.

e.g. “I rode these SICK secret trails in Xyz”

When they’re not really secret or hidden anyway. It’s just not always a good idea to say exactly where they are on YT, Insta, FB etc.

Apart from all the other stuff – and personally I find it hard to argue that mountain biking, in the context of trail centres – is more than a niche recreational hobby, which relatively affluent, self-selecting participants – it seems fundamentally wrong to me, to be encouraging people to drive, sometimes considerable, distances to ride their bikes.

It’s cloth eared, particularly from a ‘sport’ which crowbars in arguments about sustainability when it suits.

I’d suggest that if you were going to allocate funds to mountain biking, you’d be better off supporting grass-roots projects encouraging youngsters in particular, to ride bikes. We used to have one locally in Glossop and it was a great mechanism for introducing young people both to riding bikes off road and to getting outside more generally.

We had a small council-funded stock of basic hardtails for those without their own bikes and there was very little driving involved. It was popular and worked well.

There’s a bit of a lack of imagination here where people seem to think that the only way to encourage mountain biking is to finance facilities at trail centres, which almost by definition have limited accessibility by public transport outside of a very local area. That’s not really the case, I’m sure there are plenty of initiatives that could be started at a local level that would arguably be a better use of public money and still broadly benefit mountain biking. It doesn’t have to be a binary all or nothing thing.

I appreciate that the trail centre thing is more narrowly bound up with the finances and policies of individual bodies rather than a more general policy, so it’s not quite that simple, but maybe trail centres funded by public bodies were of their time and no longer are, at least in terms of being justifiable in funding terms.

I’ll admit that my views are probably coloured by my personal lack of interest in trail centres – they’ve always struck me a bland and lacking in any sense of journey, you basically ride the same trail over and over again until you end up where you started without any real sense of how you got there – but maybe the idea that they’re really a way of ‘connecting with the outdoor environment’ is overstated. Ime it’s more like being on a sort of insulated giant Scalectrix track with a cafe attached before you get back in your car and drive home safely insulated from any real contact with the outside world.

Was the original goal of the public funding to create a route for mountain bikes or was it to invest in communities though by attracting visitors?

They attracted visitors for many years, creating jobs through either accommodation or food etc.

What has been the issue is the lack of business model that invests back into the trails combined with BPW/Dyfi offering up to date, better trails and new things to keep people coming back.

Any public funding needs to have a plan for future investment otherwise the benefits get lost.

Just look at Innerleithen for how MTB can help  communities if done right.  Although that place is within an hour and a half of glasgow and Edinburgh.

I think we’re missing the point about paying for recreation and benefits for well being etc. It is a shame for the locals.

I’d always hoped those who started out and used trail centres would progress and start to ride the hills and discover a load of trails elsewhere (away from trail centres), but that hasn’t happened as I’d hoped it would.

Way back in the mists of time, a DMBinS strategy document included provision for “looser” trail marking, leading folk away from the trail centres into more open land. But, you know, DMBinS.

I think the closest we ever got to this (in Scotland) was the Green trail at Glentrool. I guess Gravelfoyle has a similar feeling to it though.

The concept has cropped up a couple of times, with the notion of a “trailhead” at Glenmore in the Cairngorms that wouldn’t have any purpose-built trails. There’s certainly lots of ways we could be encouraging folk away from the relatively densely packed traditional Trail centres.

As regards the demographics – I’ve noticed that there are way more women – and groups of women – passing through and riding locally on gravel bikes than there ever were on MTBs or road bikes.

Ime it’s more like being on a sort of insulated giant Scalectrix track with a cafe attached before you get back in your car and drive home safely insulated from any real contact with the outside world.

Well, I quite like that kind of thing but I’m struggling to work out why other people should pay for it!

Was the original goal of the public funding to create a route for mountain bikes or was it to invest in communities though by attracting visitors?

There’s a sizeable industry around squeezing money out of governments etc for these kinds of projects – from the whole Olympics and World Cups (which are simply scams imo) to much smaller projects. On some of them, identifying the core purpose is like nailing jelly to a wall. It’s about encouraging more participation among kids! It’s about getting more gold medal winners! It’s about rural economic regeneration! No, it’s about wildlife management!

Sometimes this is overambitious, overgolden thinking about what might happen. Sometimes it’s a load of bullshit to pad out the arguments. But in many cases the consequence is the same: a bunch of money is spent, there are no clear success criteria, and in trying to do everything it succeeds at nothing.

Mountain biking is never ever going to be good VFM if the objective is to spend public money on getting more people physically active. There are simple facts here: most people in the country live in towns and cities, and most mountain biking happens in the country by definition! You need a bunch of equipment to go mountain biking, and it’s bulky-ish.

Coincidentally, I was here today (on foot).

A few signs. A few posts. Free car parking. Cafes. A bike hire and repair shop.

Entices folk to participate. No massive barrier to enjoyment.

The trails exist – they are free to access – people are just too lazy to find them now.

I’d argue that trails are easier than ever to find now. The internet, YouTube, Strava, forums… I can find trails in a few seconds that would have taken hours scouring OS maps in the past, piecing together route maps from magazines (being careful to reverse any route directions given in MBR cos they’d invariably have ridden the thing the wrong way round…) and then finding that the supposed rad-to-the-power-of-sick descent you’d been promised was actually awash with cow shit from where the farmer has just moved his herd along a few fields and had 18 gates along it.

Sometimes – as with the “jumpers for goalposts” analogy – you just want some proper facilities that you know are going to be reliably decent.

It’s interesting though that the main issue with that seems to be that as soon as you turn it from a “hobby” facility (like the original CyB, run by a couple of passionate and dedicated people and with a host of volunteers all mucking in) into a corporate money-making exercise the faults appear. There’s not as much money as expected, it’s too seasonal, it’s expensive to actually pay contractors to do the work that volunteers would previously have done but you can’t use volunteers any more because health & safety / corporate procurement / standards etc…

For a while there are grants because most things in life need to be subsidised but then government / corporate priorities change, the benefits are too intangible to appear on any balance sheet, the investors want some money back… Meanwhile, fashions have changed and the riders that you’re chasing after to come and use the trail centre are all off gravel riding.

And before you know it you’re in a situation where the house of cards is falling down but no-one wants to put money into repairing it so it gets worse and fewer people come and the funds dry up more and you’re into a self-made spiral of decline but the expensive facilities and staff that you put in place during the good times still need paying for.

Great post Crazy Legs, the STW piece doesn’t seem to get this.

Which is odd, as it is also kind of a relic of that time, and also a little neglected as fashions have moved on.