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City MTB will be spending the next few days in Grand Rapids, MI at the MTB State Summit.

Jointly hosted by three mountain biking organizations:   Jersey Off-Road Bicycling Association (JORBA),  Vermont Mountain Bike Association (VMBA) and the Michigan Mountain Bike Association (MMBA), the  State Summit will bring mountain bikers from all over to learn about making mountain biking stronger and more diverse.

We hope to see you there!

A lot of the parts of creating urban mountain biking experiences are hard.  Whether it is discussing environmental impacts, trail management, volunteering or funding of trails, a lot of little things can add up.  Additionally, some things are subjective to the time, location or usage.  In other words, it can get complicated.

So how do we, as advocates, talk about complicated things without confusing or upsetting our audiences?  How can we get the context right in the simplest manner possible?
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Let’s find that out.  But first, let’s talk about an airplane crash in California to see how the lesson there can teach us why understanding complicated things is important to what we are trying to do.  Let’s also use that understanding to figure out how to talk about the complicated things of mountain biking to an audience.

​For a good section of the country, winter time brings out the hardiest of the hardy: winter bikers.  It takes a special type of person to ride their bike in the winter.  But it also takes special work to make the trails fun for riders.  That special work is known as grooming.
Grooming for winter use is becoming more regular and normal across the snowy north, but still can fall into the “black art” territory.  Why groom?  What types of grooming are there? 

“Be a team player.”  You probably have heard that phrase from the first years of your schooling.  It’s almost always used in conjunction with the idea that doing a project or activity with others will produce a better result.  Whether that is always true is debatable.

But the one area where collaboration can produce positive results is in the field of urban mountain biking public meetings and in trail layout.  And there is one method that manages to take both those disparate parts of the process and combine them.  That method is known as Collaborative Ecological Layout.
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Why should we consider this method?  What is Collaborative Ecological Layout?  How does it solve many of the issues common to mountain biking trail proposals in urban areas?

Signs and symbols are a specific part of graphic arts, called iconography.  Merriam-Webster defines iconography as:

1. pictorial material relating to or illustrating a subject
2. the traditional or conventional images or symbols associated with a subject and especially a religious or legendary subject
3. the imagery or symbolism of a work of art, an artist, or a body of art

​Trails, just like any other infrastructure conveying human beings, need signage of some kind to help direct users and get them to be aware of various realities on the trail.  But bad signage can be as bad (or worse sometimes) then no signage.

So how can a trail system do trail signage right?  What can help direct users without overloading them?

Your bike, just like you, needs a wash after it plays in the dirt.

Yet, bike wash stations at local trails can be all too rare.  Why then are bike wash stations an important part of the infrastructure for urban trails?  What styles of bike wash stations are there?  How do you get one?
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Get your sponges out and suds up as we dive into bike wash stations!

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?

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!