UCSC

There will be a public review of the UCSC bike plan next Friday November 17th from 4:30-6 pm. Details are at the end of this post.

This is a great plan since UCSC has made provisions for LEGAL off road single track trails in Section 2.

If you haven’t done so already, please make comments on the plan to UCSCbikeplan@ppc.ucsc.edu.

Some talking points:

• Express your support for the provision of recreational off-road bicycling in the draft.
• Express you willingness to help with trail design, construction and maintenance of the trails.
• Express your willingness to serve on the Campus Bicycle Committee (CBC) to oversee bicycling issues.

This recreational trails part of the plan is a great concession to the mountain biking community. I hope we can work together to make it work.

For more details please look at the Bike Plan page

UC Santa Cruz 2006 Draft Bike Plan

A public meeting to review the Draft 2006 Bike Plan (PDF) for the University of California, Santa Cruz will be held on Friday, November 17, 2006, in Bay Tree Conference Room C, from 4:30-6:00 p.m. Larry Pageler, Co-Director of Transportation and Parking Services, will start the presentation at 5:00 p.m.

This meeting is an opportunity for the campus community to comment on the Draft 2006 UCSC Bike Plan. Faculty, staff and students are encouraged to learn about and comment on the University’s framework to improve and encourage bicycle use on and around the campus. The general public is also welcome. An updated project list (although not yet available on the web) will be available at the meeting.

Comments on the Draft 2006 Bike Plan are welcome until 5:00 p.m., December 18, 2006. Send comments to: UCSCbikeplan@ppc.ucsc.edu

Questions should be directed to Larry Pageler (pageler@ucsc.edu), Co-Director of TAPS, or Cathy Crowe (cacrowe@ucsc.edu), Transportation Planner at TAPS.

The 2006 UCSC draft bike plan has been released:

http://www2.ucsc.edu/taps/pages/bike_plan.html

A review of the plan shows that UC has made provisions for LEGAL off road single track trails in their plan.

Section 2 recognizes the recreational opportunities for students and the community by allowing single track trails. Maintaining an off-road network of trails is going to require involvement from the mountain biking community in the design and maintenance of environmentally sustainable trails.

Section 4.3 discusses a bicycle licensing program as the foundation for education, outreach and enforcement. I would love to get clarity on the position of off road bikes and the licensing program.

In section 5, the plan calls for the formation of a Campus Bicycle Committee (CBC) to address the future adaptation of the plan. There are staff, student and community positions available on this committee and I hope that we can have the interests of mountain biking represented.

The bike plan is accepting written comments to UCSCbikeplan@ppc.ucsc.edu I urge you all to write to support the plan to allow mountain biking at UC. They will be accepting comments until the end of June.

Last year representatives from MBOSC had a serries of meetings with UC officials and land managers where we presented a proposal for legitimizing the UC trail network. I’m happy to say that the draft proposal incorporates many of the ideas in the proposal.

This plan is great news for mountain biking in Santa Cruz. I hope that we can count on the mountain biking community to help us out in the design, maintenance and monitoring of a future legal trail system at UCSC.

An intern named Iris is doing a study on mountain biking on the Campus Natural Reserve. She has been stopping and interviewing riders as they rode though the Upper Moore Creek (a.k.a Star Wars) trail. She interviewed a friend of mine…

She mentioned that they are considering an interpretive trail through Star Wars. She asked if bikers would stay on the trail if it was routed out of the “creek” bed. My friend mentioning the fact that it is only a creek when it rains and the runoff from parking lots and streets are also flowing into it. Bikers would stay on the trail if they made it fun but currently, it is still appropriate for bikers, horses and hikers.

It was mentioned to her the numerous studies that support our position that hikers and bikers cause similar amounts of damage and it is a qualitative difference that, due to the numbers of bikers on the trails, often gets biased against us. MBOSC has offered to help with constructing any trails on campus that would be open to bikers, and equestrians including a re-route of Seven Springs. As an example, MBOSC had success with the Uconn trail and it has held up with essentially no maintenance and the illegal campsites and bootleg running trails that used to be in that area are no longer there.

It is our opinion that the UC should use the “reserve” as a research tool to study urban trail design and use for all users. UC should not continue with the status quo that “hikers and their trail damage are okay but others are not” without providing any scientific basis for that position. People have been riding, running, and hiking on that trail far longer than it has been a reserve and that they will continue to ride it since they don’t have any better access to the upper campus. In fact, I wonder if she was aware that there is a sewer main buried down the middle of that canyon, and that the Rec department put the “par course” down it decades ago, thereby establishing it as a recreational and fitness route for the campus community.

She seems to be the typical environmental intern with preconceived ideas that mountain biking damages trails (hint: it’s actually the water) but she was still interested in getting our perspective. She admitted that she hikes and doesn’t enjoy sports involving speed so I doubt if she will ever relate to why we love riding so much.

We don’t expect much from this. It is interesting that the CNR is looking for changes to improve the situation. Maybe they’ll actually do something that doesn’t try to shut us out!