In article , Moderate says...


"SMS" wrote in message
.. .

Vandeman's goal of protecting wilderness has merit. But he's so
_incredibly_ confused about the relative impacts of different activities
on wilderness. Every study on the subject has shown that the impact of
mountain bikers is not any more than the impact of hikers, and less than
that of equestrians, and actually the mountain bike impact is often less
than that of hikers. Vandeman should be redirecting his time and energy
into campaigning against snowmobiles and other motorized off-road
vehicles.

The reality is that hikers often make trails unpleasant for use by
mountain bikers and vice-versa. They have to learn to share somehow.
Scheduling some days for each group of users would be fair. It's not a
question of who was there first.

I agree that Vandeman's actions may hurt the cause more than help.

Where did your find studies of mountain bike impact on the environment? My
observation is that bicycles cause more erosion than foot traffic and the
number of cyclists doing trail maintenance is far less than the number of
hikers doing trail maintenance.

That may be a misleading statistic.

Now, I have no idea if this is true or not; but suppose cyclists did only 30% of
the maintenance while hikers did 70%, and that cyclists constituted 15% of the
trail's users, while hikers constituted 85%.

If so, that would mean the average cyclist did 2% of the maintenance, while the
average hiker did about 1.2% of the maintenace. In other words, the average
cyclist would be doing almost twice as much maintenance as the average hiker.

Or, playing the game from the other side, maybe cyclists as a group do less
trail damage than hikers because there are less of them.

Ya gotta be careful to present the complete statistical picture. :-)