PLEASANTON — Local mountain bikers realize it as “The Trap” — a single-track path that runs down the west facet of Pleasanton Ridge by means of dense stands of oaks and round sharp, banked turns. One Saturday final month, nevertheless, The Trap lived as much as its identify in additional methods than one.
At the underside of the path, mountain bikers discovered park police ready, handing out $275 tickets to every biker that got here down.
Officially, bicycles are restricted to fireside roads inside Pleasanton Ridge. And they’re usually unlawful on trails lower than eight toes vast within the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD). But up till just lately, the ordinance had not often been enforced. Mountain bikers have loved a fragile, if unlawful, coexistence with different park customers.
The ticketing occasion rekindled an outdated dialogue between bikers and the park district about codifying equal park entry within the East Bay. And the dialogue may be heating up.
Chris Beratlis, mountain biker and proprietor of the My Buddy’s Bike Shop in Livermore, was atop the ridge that day conducting a grassroots trail-user depend. Spurred by accounts of the ticketing, he returned to his store and arranged a protest to name for expanded biker entry.
A couple of weeks later, roughly 100 mountain bikers rode en masse down Pleasanton Ridge’s fireplace roads, round different astonished path customers, to reveal the impracticality of the park’s present ordinance.
“It’s silly to put us all on the same roads,” stated Beratlis. “It’s dangerous; it’s not safe. We’re looking for fair, equal (trail) access, as equal taxpayers for the East Bay Regional Park System.”
Beratlis’s newly named Fair Recreation Equally Expressed (FREE) group is asking the park district to undertake among the park’s current single-track trails as bicycle-only, and thereby decrease the chance of accidents with different path customers and keep away from the environmental affect that new path development would have.
Parks normally comprise an unofficial, unplanned community of trails, defined Brian Holt, EBRPD chief of planning for trails. These trails may be created by individuals, however they may also be created by animals and later found by individuals.
Holt leads a trail-user working group that has solicited enter from special-interest teams, together with mountain bikers, since 2019. One of the working group’s upcoming pilot tasks is similar to what FREE is requesting. It would set up operational controls throughout the unofficial path community — controls like signage for one-way trails or alternating-day schedules for hikers and bikers.
But the members of FREE are low on persistence, because the dialog between mountain bikers and the park district just isn’t new.
Beratlis has publicly requested for equal entry since 2003. He recalled a 2009 Pleasanton Veterans Hall assembly he organized that additionally known as for the enlargement of bicycle park entry. At the assembly, EBRPD introduced a trails grasp plan that included bicycles, however “all of the promises they made have never been kept,” he stated.
Holt defined that whereas Pleasanton Ridge’s 2012 land use plan included bicycle-accessible trails, and that these trails had been permitted, they fell right into a “sort of black hole of permitting” for a few years.
“We had various federal agencies that basically declined to take jurisdiction over the permitting,” stated Holt.
Now, nevertheless, there are a number of elements pushing the Pleasanton Ridge utilization concern to the forefront.
One is the Tyler Ranch Staging Area that’s at present below development and deliberate to open this summer time. The first main parking addition to the park in a few years, Tyler Ranch will enhance Pleasanton Ridge’s parking capability from 157 to 227 areas, and invite extra hikers and bikers into the path system.
“What has been a fairly isolated park, used by mountain bikers, is going to get opened up to a lot more people,” stated William Yragui, co-founder of Mission Peak Conservancy. “And it’s going to get very contentious, very quickly, unless the park district figures out how to keep the users either separated or paying attention to the regulations.”
EBRPD is properly conscious of the time stress, stated Holt.
“We’re investing significant public funds to open up new public access at Tyler Ranch,” he continued. “When we open it up, we want to make sure that we have a trail network, a trail system, that people are going to actually want to use.”
Another issue is a pandemic-induced surge in mountain-biking curiosity. According to Beratlis, his bike store has seen a roughly five-fold enhance in mountain bike gross sales since lockdowns started, in keeping with the remainder of the trade.
The park district confirms the phenomenon, stated Holt. The unavailability of gyms through the lockdowns impressed individuals to mud off their outdated bikes or purchase new ones.
“They started going out into the parks, and they’re finding these (unofficial) trails, and they’re using them,” he continued. “And then they’re not understanding necessarily why they can’t, or why we aren’t building new things for them.”
What’s extra, added Yragui, is that among the new mountain bikers are on electrical bikes, which have electrical motors to help throughout climbs.
Electric bikes are “going to attract people that are not quite fit. And they’re going to be able to go really far, really fast, and they’re going to get over their heads really quickly,” stated Yragui, who worries that hikers, like himself, will undergo collateral injury when inexperienced bikers lose management.
Yragui, who can also be a Sierra Club member, added issues about how wildlife is impacted by mountain bikes. When a busy path bisects a habitat, he defined, it has a detrimental affect on the animals. The park district, he continued, has a accountability to open up parkland “for recreational access, but they also have a responsibility to protect habitat.”
The permits for Tyler Ranch included with them permits for a primary section of path development at Pleasanton Ridge — a few mile and a half of recent trails, plus a further 5 trail-miles quickly to observe. And these can be multi-use, bicycle-accessible trails. The extent that these trails, together with Holt’s pilot tasks, will relieve hiker-biker battle stays to be seen.
“There’s an incentive built in for the park district to get it right — and quickly,” stated Yragui. “They have to get this right. Otherwise, they’re creating huge problems for the community.”