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To provide the greatest amount of content and the highest quality content, going forward City MTB will have the following posting schedule:

• Two days a week, likely Tuesday and Friday, there will long form articles, between 500-2000 words.
• Three days a week there will be short form articles or quick links to interesting content around the web.

This will allow the writers to focus on content and give you, our reader, a greater variety of content related to urban mountain biking.  Or lasers and dinosaurs.

On April 6th, 2018 Bicycling Magazine took a break from telling its readers they needed the latest $10,000 super bike to post an article by Ayesha McGowan.  The article is about diversity, or more correctly, the lack of diversity within the cycling community.

Before going any further take a few moments to read Ms. McGowan’s article.

Ms. McGowan’s article is so powerful not only because she points to a real problem in the bicycling world, but includes relatively simple fixes to these problems.  While the article is aimed at the corporate/industrial side of bicycling, the fact of the matter is that bicycling is more than Specialized’s graphics department.  It’s all of us that use bicycles and love bicycles, whether we ride to work or on the trail.

What are other ways that the industry and us, as cyclists, can help ensure cycling appeals to everyone?

Let’s stop trying to sell dentists another bike.  It’s easy to pick on magazines like Bicycling for having pages of $10,000 bikes with glowing reviews arguing that 3mm shorter chainstays means you need to sell your previous $10,000 bike and get this one.  But the fact of the matter is, these bikes are being provided by the companies.  Those reviewers know who is paying the bills.  They aren’t likely to suggest they would prefer to review a much more budget friendly bike as that would mean their jobs.

Open up a copy of Bicycle Retailer and there is a disturbing trend:  The amount of money the industry makes as stayed relatively steady, but the number of bikes sold is dropping.  Why?  Because for years, the industry has tried to sell different bikes to the same people.  You need a 29er, you need a fat bike, you need a gravel bike, you are getting older, you need an e-MTB.  Oh, we changed the axle standard (again) and won’t be making spare parts, so you’ll need to buy a whole new bike (again) when the hub implodes.  There is only so many times a company or companies can dip in that well before customers either get tired of it and just stop buying or realize that contentment isn’t a bad thing.

Basically, the industry needs to stop trying to sell to the same dentist and start reaching out to the very people that Ms. McGowan is talking about missing from the industry’s marketing material.  And to appeal to those people, the industry is going to have to change the focus of its R & D efforts.  Which leads us to…

Let’s make the “blue collar” bikes better.  Walk into a bike shop and find any $500 bike.  What do you notice about it.  Well, it likely has a drivetrain straight from the year 2000.  The brakes, either mechanical or cheapy hydraulic, function about as well as Fred Flinestone’s feet.

Here is the thing: those $500 bikes are the ones a lot of people, including kids in NICA programs and the very people Ms. McGowan is asking you to reach out to, can actually afford.  Unfortunately, race is the biggest determiner in the economic purchasing power of a person.  That great-X-grandchild of slaves living in Mississippi can’t afford the $2,000 hardtail 29er, even with the NICA discount.  But they can work a summer bagging groceries and afford the $500 one. Why not make sure that $500 bike is going to be usable, not frustrating to own/repair and makes them a future customer of your brand?

Yet, to create better bikes in the “blue-collar” price range, $500-$1000, bike companies are going to have to shift some R & D dollars and put pressure on component manufacturers to make better low-end components.

It’s not impossible, as these components already exist or could exist with little work.  As an example, TRP makes a brilliant family of symmetrical mechanical brakes (the Spyre for road bikes, Spykes for mountain bikes) that stop better than every low end hydraulic brake on the market and every other mechanical brake on the market.  Why isn’t Trek, Specialized or Giant making a phone call to Tektro (the parent company of TRP) and seeing what the very special price would be on thousands of units of these brakes?  Another example.  Nearly every sub-$1000 bike is carting around a 3x9 drivetrain that can double as a boat anchor.  Why?  Both Shimano & Sram make 1x drivetrains.  If Trek, Specialized or Giant came to these companies and asked for a 1x drivetrain that met the budget constraints of a blue collar bike, they aren’t likely to turn them down.  (Side note: Sunrace already makes affordable wide range drivetrains in 1x9, 1x10 & 1x11 setups.)

The canard that is often thrown out is it’s not possible due to economics of scale.  Yet, Trek, Specialized and Giant all have these same companies produce custom drivetrain and suspension components for their high-end bikes, which sell in smaller numbers than the cheaper bikes.  Therefore, per a unit all these custom parts are far more expensive.  Fox, Shimano and Sram aren’t creating custom fork tuning or branded cranks out of the goodness of their heart, they are getting paid.  So instead of pushing that money into a custom fork offset in your uber bike that sells less than a hundred units a year, why not pay them to create good components that are affordable, would be somewhat close in weight to their mid-range components and allow you to create decent “blue collar” bikes?

If you are reading this as a bike industry executive, do you think following the (great) advice of Ms. McGowan and altering your marketing outreach to a more diverse group is going to matter if those persons can’t afford the bikes you make?

Cyclists come in every flavor, so let’s make our outreach not just about the vanilla one.  It might be easy to assume all cyclists ride the same way or enjoy the same type of riding that is popular in your area.  But the fact of the matter is that the greatest number of cyclists aren’t hipsters in bike lanes.  They are poor people (which is almost always synonymous with “minority”) who bike because it’s the best way to get around on their budget.  These invisible cyclists are far greater in number that post-college kids in skinny jeans.

Let’s be blunt about this: far too many bike advocacy organizations and club’s group photos look more like the Aryan ideal than a diverse group making cycling better for everyone.  It’s not a perception that is lost on those like Ms. McGowan and like the very groups of people she was suggesting that bicycling include in its outreach.   For many of them there are activities or locations that are “white spaces”, where they just aren’t welcome.  Cycling isn’t a “white space”, but you wouldn’t know that from the people who are advocating for cycling.  As an example, how can a bike advocacy organization address fears of gentrification when discussing bike lanes or fears of racial profiling when discussing Vision Zero if everyone in that organization looks like the gentrifiers and the profilers?  If you don’t have any low income or immigrant members in your advocacy organization, how can you know the needs of that community?

But if you want to reach outside the “young, white, artsy” crowd for bike advocacy, that means you are going to have to…

Back cycling projects that actually help the most amount of people or people that really need it.  You often see bike advocacy groups pushing for bike lanes, claiming these bike lanes will help everyone.  If that is true, then why do a lot of bike lanes seem to stop before they get to “that part of town”?

An example of the effects of not thinking about who needs the help most: one of the poorest sections of New York City is the neighbor on the edge of   Melrose-Morrisania in South Bronx with a median home income of $8,694.  (Even if you include all of Melrose, the income only goes up to $22,987.)  Want to guess how many bike lanes run through the area?  Two; one on Melrose, the other on St. Anns Avenue.  Park Slope in Brooklyn has been one of the hottest housing markets in New York for some time and now has a median income of $126,073.  Want to guess how many bike lanes run through that area?  East-West, one every 5 blocks, North-South, one every block.

Even with the awful bike infrastructure in Melrose-Morrisania, Google Maps shows its barely over an hour to get from there to south Manhattan.  Because of the gaps in the system the fastest way southward is the Hudson Greenway.  (The East Side Greenway would be a viable alternative if it didn’t have gaps.)  Getting to the Hudson Greenway requires crossing a lot of sketchy roadway, but it’s doable. Even then, it’s only 8 minutes longer than taking the subway to the same location.  That means properly motivated citizens of Melrose-Morriania, with a decent bike, could tap into the economic opportunity in Manhattan.  Think of all the opportunity, including educational ones, that could follow if there were better bike routes from one of the poorest parts of New York to one of the richest.  Mopping floors at Charles Schwab isn’t glamorous, but it earns you far more than $8,694 a year.  But how many articles have you read in Streetsblog or the Gothamist advocating for filling the gaps in the network from Melrose-Morrisania to Manhattan?

That is the point here.  It’s great bike advocates have added bike lanes all over New York City.  But as much success as there is, it sure is funny how those bike lanes aren’t where the people who would benefit the most from them live.  The people in Park Slope are fine people, but they aren’t somehow worthier of good walking, biking and commuting infrastructure than the people of Melrose-Morrisania.  If we, as cyclists, really care about people the way we say we do, maybe it’s time we started backing projects based on how many they help or based on the fact they help those that need it most.  The fact that these types of projects seem to find their way into only the parts of the city that look like a lot of bike advocacy organization’s group photos is proof that who is part of an organization determines who it helps.

Ms. McGowan is right in so many ways.  But honestly, hiring more people for advertising photos that might have skin shades in tones other than eggshell isn’t enough.  If we read articles like the one she penned and say we believe in diversity, then let’s start acting like it.  That may mean having some uncomfortable conversations or coming to some uncomfortable realizations about ourselves.  It may mean we must start listening instead of talking.

​Most importantly, it means we are going to have to reorder our priorities.  For the bike industry, that means reaching out to new audiences for sales and creating decent bikes people in the audiences can afford instead of creating yet another $10,000 bike to have reviewers in Bicycling Magazine praise.  For us, as cyclists, we need to reach out to our neighbors and include them in a truly meaningful way into our organizations and backing projects that actually help everyone.

Thank you Ms. McGowan for your sobering words.

While man has always sought to fly, in the post-World War 2 time period, there was a growing interest in the idea of “flying cars”, that is personal flying devices that could pull into a garage and then whisk their inhabitants off to a location.  At the time, it seemed like the stars had aligned for just such a reality.  Thru the war, 2 inventions were refined that seemed to make this possible: the gas turbine and the helicopter.  In fact, German engineers had developed the intermesh helicopter, a type that auto hovers.  Many of those engineers and scientists found their way to the United States via Operation Paperclip.

On paper, a flying car sounds great.  Faster than ground transportation and able to go point-to-point versus following roads.  However, in practice, the idea of a flying car is a nightmare.  Besides the complexities of actually flying an aircraft, there is the matter of preventing all these flying cars from running into one another.  Then there is the fact that conditions in air are always changing as the atmosphere takes on many properties of a fluid in a vessel, with competing air currents and changes in air flow.  From that time till today, history is littered with failed flying car ideas, some famous, some not so famous.  In the end, the idea of the flying car remains (and likely will always remain) an idea.

When it comes to user management techniques, there is one that sounds like a great idea on paper, but a nightmare in actual usage: Alternating Use.  This leads to the following questions:

• What is “Alternating Use”?
• Why is Alternating Use such a bad idea?
• How are other management techniques superior?

​Let’s see how the idea is not matched by the reality.

Many things come in boxes, from the small boxes for jewelry to the large heavily built boxes for appliances.  In mythology, it was Pandora’s Box (though in the original Greek it was a jar) that contained all the ills of the world that were let loose when Pandora decided to take a peek.  In religious connotations, the Jewish Ark of the Covenant was an ornate box to hold the original tablets of the commandments.

There is another type of box we will consider, one containing mountain bike trails.  This type of use is known as Boxed Use.  To know what comes in that box, we need to answer the following:

• What is “Boxed Use”?
• How are Boxed Use and Segregated Use different?
• When does Boxed Use make sense?

​Let’s lift the lid and see what Boxed Use all about!

While we think of some cars as being “hybrids”, having both gas and electric powerplants, the greatest use of hybrids has always been in agriculture.  Farmers realized certain types of wheat had more yield, but were fragile and other types of wheat were hardy but had low yield.  The answer: pollinate one type with the other and cultivate the wheat that had both characteristics; yield and hardiness.  From the moment man began farming, creating hybrids, either on purpose or by accident, was just a basic part of the process.  Today, large percentages of fruits and grains we consume are hybrids in some way.

But what if, as we are creating urban mountain biking trails, we need a little bit of this and that?  Is there a way to do what a farmer would do, mix the attributes of various user management techniques?

There is, and that is called Hybrid Use.  To explore this user management technique, we need to know the following:

• What is “Hybrid Use”?
• Where does Hybrid Use make sense?
• How does Hybrid Use keep users happy?

​Let’s do some cross-pollination and see what we get!

​When you do laundry, you are well aware of the need to place certain colors and fabrics in separate loads.  Cottons, whites, colored.  This type of segregation of clothes is important as placing certain clothes together can damage them.  Reds and whites are a common example of this, as either the colors will run, turning whites pink or the red will be bleached out.
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While we have spent the last 3 parts of this series talking about how to share trails, today we go a much different direction: ensuring these users that previously shared, never share.  Much like the laundry, we are going to sort them, segregating them in other words, into their unique experiences.  If that is the case, we have some questions we need to answer:

• What is “Segregated Use”?
• How canb Segregated Use be considered sharing?
• What can Segregated Use do create successful hiking and mountain biking?

It’s time to sort everyone into their boxes with the Segregated Use user management technique.

Preferences can be strange things.  Some preferences, like our favorite flavor of ice cream are relatively minor with little or no influence on our lives.  Others, like whom we wish to form romantic attachments to, can be very powerful and they can be one of our defining characteristics.   Many preferences change with time and a few stay the same our whole lives.

When it comes to trails and users on those trails, we can make choices that sort users and show that we prefer one set of users.  Therefore:

• What is “Preferred Use” in relation to trail sharing?
• How can we make Preferred Use a true preference?
• What specifically is needed to be successful in Preferred Use?

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Get your favorite ice cream spoon out as we dig into Preferred Use user management techniques.

Going back to the metaphor that we used in the Part 2 of this series, if we imagine a set of scales, preferred use trails would tip one side of the scale toward one user group or another.  But they wouldn’t remove the other user group completely.  Clearly, when making choices in trail design and management, we are going to skew our choices toward our preferred user group.  But that doesn’t mean we would be callous to choices that might affect safety or other factors with that other user group.  Think of it as affirmative action for trails.

As we discussed in Part 1 of this series, the preference can work out in the real world in 3 types of preferences.  Those preferences can be in the favor of hikers, or they can be in preference of mountain bikers.  Or we can really turn the dial and go bike primary, where we basically build a full-on mountain bike trail that we let hikers and trail runners on.  All three are still preferred use.  Think of them as the vanilla, chocolate and Under the Stars versions of trail flavors.

The first thing we should understand is that to do preferred in way that doesn’t alienate the other user we need to think about experience ahead of time.  Remember, we are preferring a user group, not kicking the other user group out.  That means we still need to understand what user groups want and what they are comfortable with.  Even the not-so-preferred group.

For preferred use trails, that means directionality.  Directionality helps us control on-trail experiences, meaning we can know how user group A will approach a corner and how user group B will approach that same corner.  It basically removes a whole set of variables from the equation.  This allows us to focus on getting the rest of the experience just right.
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A special note here.  Because there is directionality, that means we should strive for a real stacked loop system.  There is some confusion in certain parts of the country as to what qualifies as a stacked loop system.  Some think a stacked loop system is moving from one trail to another that eventually returns you to the beginning.  That is a route, not a stacked loop.  A stacked loop is basically a series of full loop trails, each beginning and ending off another loop.

Because we have directional traffic, that means we can narrow up the bench in relation to a shared use trail.  These can be as narrow as 36” in width, except at choke points.  For trails were we prefer hiking, we would also want to tighten up the corners to the point they require slow mountain bike speeds and maybe a bit of body English.  Whether hiker or biker preferred, we can also narrow up the choke points, being 18” wide at the bottom and at least a handlebar wide where needed.  We wouldn’t do choke points on a bike primary trail, except at the entrance to corners and intersections, where the entrance speeds would need to meet a safety factor.

Depending on who we are preferring as far as user group, the trail bench should be manipulated to match.  For a hiker preferred trail, we might include timber steps, whether singularly, or overlapping.  Because we aren’t trying to keep mountain bikers out, its best to keep the step at 6” or less, and for uphills, spaced out where they won’t cause too many issues for most mountain bikers.  For directionality that is opposite/face-to-face, these can be used on mountain biker downhill, hiker uphill at full height (8”).  Bermed corners are now an option for mountain biking preferred trails, though a flat inner section should be included to allow hikers to easily negotiate the turn.  For bike primary, the trail should be constructed as you would for a full-on mountain biking experience.
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Please remember that so long as the directionality of the trail isn’t altered, there is nothing wrong with having some trails in a larger system to be hiker preferred and some be biker preferred.  This will sort out users and over time each trail will gain a reputation within the user community.

Previously, when talking about Shared Use, we discussed the importance of signage.  All those recommendations still stand and are maybe even a little more urgent with Preferred Use.

However, signage isn’t the magic bullet to successful preferred use.  What often can be the difference between good and poor preferred use is how the trail enters and exits from its access points.  Many preferred use trails have a short two-way (and sometimes rather wide) pre-trail that leads to a definite “T” with an unmistakable set of signs to get users going the right way from the beginning.  This works in two ways.  First, it reduces confusion by only providing one point to go to (or come from).  Second, it leads users down to a point where much larger than normal signage can be used to direct them.

Just like Shared Use, adding items for one user group or the other is not out of the question.  However, because we are tilting the scales a little bit with preferred use to one user group or another, its less important to do this.
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For preferred use, user group patrols of trained patrollers are highly suggested.  While it’s a great idea for safety and to act as ambassadors for the trails, parks and land managers, on preferred use trails, these patrollers can act as “guide dogs” and lead other users in enjoying the trail to the max.

Preferred Use works great for district or larger trails.  It’s not as easy to implement as Shared Use, but it does have its benefits.  It still allows conversion to segregated use if needed, though it’s nearly impossible to convert down to Shared Use. Once created though, the amount of land manager overhead for the trail drops considerably.  All user groups are accommodated, but the trail itself is doing some of the management versus staff.  

As part of the Knobbies in the Neighborhood presentation a complete User Management Techniques matrix is available that contains all the information presented here and much more.

This is Part 3 in a series on User Management Techniques.  Up next: Segregated Use.

Raising Children Australia, says the following about “sharing”:

​While it’s safe to assume most of us learned how to share at home and kindergarten, it does raise some questions that are pertinent to the idea of shared trails:

• What is “Shared Use” when we talk about trail sharing?
• What allows for positive Shared Use?
• What specifically is needed to create positive Shared Use?

We will answer these questions and more as we discuss Shared Use user management techniques.

How do you manage users on the trail?  They will be there, often without knowledge of the trail and its history.  Some will have no idea that different user groups are going to be there also.  So how can you make sure everyone has a good time?  How can you ensure everyone knows how to interact?
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The way to manage these experiences is known as “user management techniques”.  This article is the first in a series on user management techniques and how to use them for urban mountain biking.

Mountain biking, as a sport and recreational endeavor, isn't very old.  Depending on how you define the moment mountain biking was born, mountain biking is around 40 years old.  In those 40 years, we’ve gone from cobbled together rigid bikes to bikes able climb to and descend on nearly every terrain available.  We’ve gone from a group of hippies to one of the fastest growing sports for high school kids.

There is a lot to be proud of.
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But we have brought some baggage with us that, much like disco and sex in a van with an airbrushed desert scene, is better left behind.  What could that be?  It’s simple: illegal trail building and trail riding.