Foldable Bikes Party: Mountain biker, love thy e-neighbor

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Mountain biking and trail access, two highly controversial subjects in some areas of the US, and now another wrench is being thrown into the spokes: electric-assist mountain bikes.

While I wholehearted agree with Josh Patterson and his call for e-bike trail education, I feel as though cyclists might be jumping the gun on this, making it a bigger deal than it is.

There’s a term my wife and I use when one of us is getting ahead of ourselves: prevenge. Prevenging is when you predict the future, often negatively, when the outcome may be different. Basically you are striking pre-emptively from a place of fear, to 'get them before they get you.'

In my two decades of riding trail it seems that most conflicts happen on the downhills, or when one user doesn't give the right of way as expected.

First and foremost, mountain bikers need to support their own. There are plenty of MTB-hate groups parading as environmentalists, so we should be the last ones to condemn anyone wanting to get out on relatively silent, non-polluting bicycles.

By dictating which group of riders gets to ride where, we’re dumping fuel on an already scalding hot set of coals. Group A always loves it when the opposing Group B has fissures within itself. It’s like fish in a barrel to point out, “half of their own group thinks they shouldn’t be on trails!”

Now hold on, I can hear you saying, “all it takes is one jerk to get a trail closed,” or “if we wait, then it’ll be too late.” I absolutely don’t want fewer trails, and I really can’t stand the typically insane access-issue politics, but jumping on a new segment of bikes, a segment that could potentially get more people turned on to riding, seems a bit ironic. This is chapter one, page one of the line of attack by hikers and equestrians since mountain bikes weren’t around back in the good ol’ days. It's kind of reminiscent of the new kid at school phenomenon.