- Target:
- Mountain bikers of Boulder, Colorado
- Region:
- United States of America
- Website:
- bouldermountainbike.org
Thanks for participating in this petition. We now progress to the nine member Boulder City Council to ask for reasonable access to the West TSA. Stay tuned to www.bouldermountainbike.org for updates and put March 15 on your calendar... The last chance we have to ask for reasonable access!
The draft Boulder City Open Space & Mountain Parks West Trail Study Area Plan (OSMP West TSA Plan) proposes continuing a decades old bike ban. Despite two long years of intense effort by BMA, even our modest requests for limited access have been rejected. None of the existing 78 miles of trails are to be opened to bikes and none of the approximately 17 miles of new trails will be either.
OSMP staff offers instead two presently unobtainable "future" opportunities: an access via the Eldorado State Park that, after 10 years of effort, is still opposed by the Park and possible use of the Chapman Drive dirt road, to which OSMP does not have legal access.
In addition, the staff has presented the traditional package of demonstratively contrived "environmental" and "user conflict" issues as justification for continuing the mountain bike prohibition.
Mountain bikers (and BMA) are the most engaged and service oriented user group in Boulder County. BMA has 20 years of volunteer service, trail construction, maintenance, patrolling, and visitor education. The staff's rejection of our modest requests and their lack of any realistic justification for the rejection leaves us no choice. We must speak out in opposition to the staff's unjustified opinions and to their misrepresentations of mountain bike issues.
Please do your part, sign this petition, and visit the BMA website (http://bouldermountainbike.org) to see what else you can do in the next month to defend Boulder mountain biking.
I am a mountain biker who lives, works, and plays in the Boulder area. I support limited access for mountain bikes in the West TSA. In particular, I support the modest requests of the Boulder Mountainbike Alliance, which include a route from the Table Mesa neighborhood south to Eldorado Drive and a loop trail on Anemone Hill.
I reject the OSMP staff's opinions that the tiny portion of the trail system that may be opened to bikes (less than 5%) will add unacceptable environmental damage and that user interactions due to this small bike access will cause "irreconcilable" conflicts despite the fact that such shared use trails are the successful norm elsewhere in Boulder County and throughout the Colorado Front Range.
The Bikes Belong in the West TSA petition to Mountain bikers of Boulder, Colorado was written by MICHAEL BARROW and is in the category Sports at GoPetition.