[pct-l] Bicycle Usage Proposal

[Diane Soini of Santa Barbara Hikes]

A few years ago, my friend was hit by a bicyclist on a trail. It was  
not in the wilderness. She decided something had to be done to make  
the trails safer. Word got out among the mountain bikers that she was  
doing something about them. Someone posted her name, address and  
telephone number on the internet, offering that she lived alone and  
suggesting maybe someone should visit her some evening with a  
baseball bat.

Later, someone else I know got involved in trying to make the trails  
safer and word got out among the mountain bikers. He received emails  
filled with profanity from a school server in Canada. Unsure why kids  
in Canada cared about riding bicycles on Santa Barbara trails. He  
wrote the school to tell them that these emails didn't reflect well  
on their school. The children got in trouble.

Things escalated in our community. It became very tense to go for a  
hike. Even though many were polite, many were not. I was on one hike  
where Australian mountain bikers purposefully tried to run an 80 year  
old man off the trail. I was on another where bikers purposefully  
tried to run me off the trail. I yelled at them and they waited for  
me at the bottom to curse me out and presumably to beat me up. I'm a  
woman and they were big men. I was on another hike where my boyfriend  
stuck out his trekking poles to avoid being run over. This caused a  
huge fuss with letters to the editor and nastiness and vitriol all  
around.

I went on a volunteer trail clearing day. The mountain bikers show up  
in force on these. They keep meticulous records of their work so that  
they can claim that the trails belong to them because they do more  
work than anybody else. I did a lot of work that day and when it was  
pretty obvious there was no more to be done, I started returning to  
the top to put my tools away. One of the mountain bikers taunted me  
that I was "quitting so soon." I decided to screw doing any trail  
work with these people. They are mean-spirited to the core.

After the emails and the threat to my female friend and them  
threatening me, I decided to have nothing more to do with the issue.  
I stopped hiking on trails that were the most popular with cyclists.  
I disallowed any posts on my own web site that were not from Santa  
Barbara, that contained nastiness and misspellings and were on the  
topic of mountain biking. My boyfriend continued to go to local  
meetings of a "working group" that tried to resolve the issue. I  
stayed out of it as much as I could.

I do hope supporting the PCT doesn't turn out like this. I would urge  
people not to suggest slashing tires or booby-trapping the trail or  
otherwise causing mayhem. It will only make things worse.