Mount Tamalpais trails to open to bikes
The Marin Municipal Water District will open nearly 7 miles of trails to cyclists in the Mount Tamalpais watershed.
The district board voted unanimously to approve two pilot programs — an electric bike program and a trail-sharing program — at its meeting on Tuesday. The initiative asks hikers, bikers and equestrians to share a portion of trails for two years as the district assesses the effects.
“I think this is a very conservative first step,” said Matt Samson, the board’s vice president. “In my opinion, this is a responsible look at ways we can include a new popular demographic in a way that makes sense that we can control, that we can understand where they go, and that we can understand what the impacts are so we can either change or make it better.”
Shaun Horne, director of watershed resources, said the project began in 2018, when the district was looking at allowing electric bikes on the trails. The pilot program is the recommended outcome of a recreation management study approved by the district in April.
Bike access on the Mount Tamalpais watershed has been a polarizing issue for over 30 years. The pilot program is controversial, with people citing safety and environmental impacts as their main concerns.
Linda Novy, president of the Marin Horse Council, said the speed of bike riders compared to other visitors creates a safety hazard. She said the fear of an incident happening also negatively affects the ability to recreate on the mountain.
“When you add to the mix, let’s call them foot people, hooves or feet, and you’re going 1 to 2 miles an hour and you mix that with people riding 15 miles per hour and faster, it really diminishes one’s experience of being in nature and it changes the culture of being in nature and participating through passive recreation,” Novy said.
Tracy McDermott of Fairfax said she has been riding her horses on Mount Tamalpais for over 50 years. She said bikers already don’t follow the rules, and none of those trails are wide enough to support horses and bikes. She said combined with hikers, an accident is imminent.
“Not one of those trails is not traveled by bikes today — e-bikes, regular bikes and at speed,” she said. “Believe me, it’s dangerous. One injury and every ratepayer pays because eventually responsibility will be fixed. You will be liable.”
Samson said safety is meant to be adaptively managed. He said he believes the directional approach, weekday limits and other safety considerations are good.
“If we didn’t do that, if we just shut down everything that was quote-unquote unsafe, as a relative term, folks would no longer hike at Cataract Trail,” he said. “There would be a lot of interesting experiences that people do all day long in the mountain that we would have to yank back if we drove with a really strict safety component all the time.”
Before the program begins, district staff will install trail usage signs, do maintenance and prune vegetation, create a new watershed map that is compatible with geolocation, highlight the pilot trails and add watershed biodiversity kiosks.
The trails that will be part of the pilot programs are Sunnyside, Pumpkin Ridge, Upper Fish Gulch, Madrone and Concrete Pipe Road trails. Top and mid-range trails include Mountain Top, Middle Peak Road, Airforce Throughway, Arturo and Lakeview trails. Grassy Slope Road in the Pine Mountain area will also be part of the pilot.
“One of the complicated ones that is being considered is Sunnyside,” Horne said. “That’s where we had the highest level of use on the weekends. We’re recommending that we think about a weekday-only approach on that trail and recommending a directional approach.”
The trails were selected through analysis of terrain difficulty, conflict and enforcement history, hazards, erosion risk, water quality and other criteria. Horne said rare plant data were also overlaid with the trails to make sure there was no threat to them.
Larry Minikes of the Marin Conservation League said the potential for habitat fragmentation and environmental damage by bikes is too great, and the district needs to address the effects the program might have before it begins.
“Particularly the impacts to small creatures, including snakes, lizards and newts who tend to sun on open ground and migrate across these trails, as potentially being crushed in larger numbers by bike tires going across these trails,” Minikes said.
The Sunnyside, Arturo, Lakeview, Mountain Top and Airforce Throughway trails and Middle Peak Road will be closed to equestrians. The rest of the trails will be open to all visitors, and trails will restrict directional access for bikes.
A separate pilot program for class one e-bikes, or pedal-assist bikes, was also approved by the board. Horne said staff will evaluate how these bikes affect visitors’ experiences. Trail counters will be installed at various locations on the watershed to collect data on who is visiting and with what kind of transportation. Two visitor surveys also will be done.
Craig Van Haren, an avid mountain biker, spoke at the meeting against allowing e-bikes on the trails. He said they go too fast.
“They are motorcycles, and you have no idea how powerful they are,” Van Haren said.
Horne said staff won’t differentiate between the impacts between an e-bike or traditional bike, or how different types of visitors may influence the wildlife or habitat. Staff will monitor and collect data on aspects like number of visitors, trail conditions, if invasive species are spreading, visitor frequency, what kind of experience people have, and overall compliance between different types of visitors.
Don Wick, the district’s chief ranger, said educating people on the rules will be essential. While trails were picked for their line of sight and difficulty, adding clear signage and slow zones will be important.
“Our goal is safety for all the visitors,” Wick said. “It’s a big change for everybody. I think the main thing is we want to educate. It’s incumbent on behavior on every visitor’s part for this to be successful.”
Novy said complying with the rules is already an issue. She has heard of, or experienced herself, times where bikers were on trails meant only for equestrians and hikers. She said sometimes bikers are simply going too fast around blind corners, which also causes safety issues. This has led to a lack of trust between groups, she said.
“I think what the public would like to see is an improvement in the culture of compliance,” Novy said. “That would help build trust in the community to show that mountain bike riders are serious about following the rules. Right now there is no trust in that. Why would I trust that?”
Board member Jed Smith said building trust within the community is critical. He said the pilot’s quarterly stakeholder meetings should be informal and emphasized it is essential to build trust between different stakeholders.
“These pilot trails will be the most scrutinized in the history of Marin Water,” Smith said. “I expect there will be lessons that we learn that can apply to the entire trail system. I hope that if we do this right we will come out of it with a much better set of data and policies to protect the systems and be better stewards of it.”
Kelly Bennett of Fairfax said he is a horse owner, mountain biker and hiker, and he supports both the programs. He said he felt like the programs were well thought out.
“I think that everyone and every point of that star has really thought deeply and done their homework and their research,” Bennett said.
Ginger Howard, a senior at Redwood High School and a captain of its mountain bike team, said the notion that modern mountain bikers don’t care about the environment is a false stereotype.
“I speak on behalf of my team that if we get access to these trails, we will put in a great amount of work to maintain these trails and protect the nature around them,” Howard said.
Charlotte Philkill, also a senior on the team, said hikers and bikers have many things in common: They love the outdoors, value their time outside and want to get exercise. Philkill said she has been on many teams, and all of them cover trail-sharing rules.
“I can assure you that trail etiquette is covered right off the bat, that is something we’re tested on,” Philkill said. “We have to be nice. We have to slow down. We do say hello, say thank you, and all the above. Marin is the birthplace of mountain biking and I think that restricting it or not giving access to these trails is honestly doing a disservice.”
Tarrell Kullaway, executive director of the Marin County Bicycle Coalition, applauded those who were keeping an open mind on the topic, and acting out of concern for the next generation rather than fear and resistance to change.
“There are a lot of us who care about these trails,” Kullaway said. “There are a lot of us who have been excluded from them for decades. In the birthplace of mountain biking, it’s a real shame.”
Samson said the point of the pilot program is to see if a new form of recreation can co-exist responsibly, safely and in a non-disruptive way, with older forms and the overall watershed. He said he believes the pilot will help determine this.
“There’s a concern here that this is a revolution,” Samson said. “That we’re having this fundamental shift, or some people say a new paradigm, as we move forward on these aspects, and I don’t think so. I think we’re dealing with a different demographic in the district. We are looking at people who recreate in a different way and it’s not wrong to do that.”
Horne said the district is planning to do maintenance and safety improvements through this month and get both programs running in October.