Urban mountain biking or off-road cycling, which is correct?

While perusing this site, you may have noted the term “urban mountain biking” used versus the term “urban off-road cycling”.  Why is that?

The first thing that should be acknowledged is that neither term is perfect.  Both have their pluses and minuses.  Such is the way with terminology used in the sport of mountain biking.  The term “mountain bike” makes no sense as there are plenty of places with fun mountain bike trails that have zero mountains.  The types of mountain biking also use terms that are confusing.  “Cross country”, “all mountain” and “downhill”.  At some point, every type of bike does what these terms describe in some way.

“Off-road cycling” is a term that has recently gained some traction with land managers.  The primary reason is that this term allows many types of cycling to fit under an umbrella term.  The land manager can create a policy that covers everything to quarter acre pump track to 20-mile singletrack trail system.  This honestly does have some merit from a land managers standpoint.  One bucket for all the things that that involve bikes on dirt.

But there are some serious problems with the use of this term.  Some are pretty obvious, some are not.  They include:

• Confusion over whether the term is talking about bicycling on paved or gravel paths that happen to be away from an established street, like a Rails to Trails path.  Some of this confusion is innocent, a confusing of off-street bicycling infrastructure with being “off the road”.  Some of it is not and there is an intentional attempt to make off-street bicycling infrastructure mean the same as off-road cycling so that those persons can say, “I’m for off-road cycling, but I’m against mountain biking”.
•  When you look at the types of wheels on dirt experiences that currently exist in urban areas of the United States, the clear majority are singletrack mountain bike systems.  Something like 95% of them fit that criteria.  Let’s be clear, cyclocross courses, pump tracks, jump tracks and the like do exist in urban areas.  But often these are placed with a much larger singletrack course or bike park.  Highbridge Park in New York City is a great example of this.  It contains a dirt jump and pump track in the post-industrial part of the property and singletrack trails in the wooded area.  Since singletrack riding is what most people would consider “mountain biking” and it’s clearly the majority of whatever we are calling this, let’s just call it what it is.
•  The argument against using the term “mountain biking” is that it might frighten some of the public.  We can blame advertisers, bike companies and even bicycling media that output aggressive photos and videos of what mountain biking “is”.  The argument is that the confusion between the advertising view of mountain biking and the reality will cause citizens to be opposed to mountain biking.  But here is the sad fact: the people that don’t like mountain biking wouldn’t suddenly start liking it if it’s called “off-road cycling”.  You could call it “Pretty Pretty Princess Gwendolyn” and they still wouldn’t like it.  So why play semantics games with what we are trying to create?  Let’s just call it urban mountain biking and work hard to use factual information, which we have tons of, to show there is nothing to be scared of.

Both of  these are biking off of a road.  But only one of them is "off road cycling" (Hint: its the right one.)

Because of these reasons, City MTB will use the term “urban mountain biking” when discussing bicycling wheels on dirt.  Let’s acknowledge that it is imperfect and it doesn’t technically cover things like BMX tracks, cyclocross or adventure courses.  However, it perfectly describes the largest type of wheels on dirt experience in the United States: mountain biking on singletrack trails.