BCC Keeps pushing snooze
In 2021, BCC’s Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner said, ‘we are not locking up our natural areas’ but actions since then show that they are doing exactly that. By restricting the formal growth of the trails and allowing an anti-bike culture to grow inside, BCC is snoozing the life out of mountain biking in Brisbane. They are locking up our reserves and paying lip service to the popularity of the sport.
The recently announced master plan for Barrambin | Victoria Park puts ‘mountain biking’ in the headline but then crams one trail into a sliver of land 50m wide and 600m long. That’s like announcing a new golf course when you’re really planning a two-hole Putt Putt.
There doesn’t need to be mountain biking in every park, and by constructing these tiny white elephants, the council is wasting money and showing a deep lack of understanding of the sport. Mountain bikers are similar to hikers in that they want to go outdoors and have an adventure - for at least a couple of hours. We don’t want to be crowded into one tiny trail like sardines. That’s why the Australian MTB guidelines suggest that the minimum size parcel of land for a small regional network is 150 hectares.
Orphan trails like the one proposed at Barrambin and the isolated, uninspiring skills tracks at McGregor and Stafford miss the mark by a long shot, and are worse than a waste of money. They are challenging for about 30 seconds, encourage kids to get a taste for mountain biking and then next school holidays they’ll join their mates digging holes in the local park to make proper jumps.
BCC needs to get realistic about ‘implementing our’ off-road cycling strategy, prioritise expanding the network at Mt Coot-tha and formalising the trails at the other substantial locations around the city. They also need to bite the bullet on the perceived issue in the community and get some collaboration going between genuine environmental groups and mountain bike groups.
BORRA has met privately with several groups and jointly encouraged BCC to set up a forum for further discussion. Like a lot of things related to mountain biking, BCC keeps pressing snooze on this too.
Their ‘do nothing’ option is actually the worst possible outcome here because it enables the vicious circle of unauthorised trail building to restart every year.
BCC seems to think that the only way to manage this is to simply fine people riding unauthorised trails. The problem with that naive response is that the riders getting fined don’t influence (or even know) the informal trail builders, so the desired effect doesn’t happen. This non-link might have been tricky to predict the first time round (back in the 90s), but since then, the same BCC people have been overseeing this vicious circle. After 25 plus years, you’d think they would have figured it out by now.
Why haven’t they figured it out? The genuine environmental groups are starting to understand that there is a better way to change behaviour (as many have, around the world and in the rest of the country). It looks like BCC is either out of touch with the rest of the world, or it doesn’t want to do anything about this. We think the community needs to know why.
It’s time to put the spotlight on Australia’s most snoozy MTB council.