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Marin County Parks
Marin Parks Visitor Survey Goes Light On Trails Safety
To hear bike access lobbyists tell it, genuine safety concerns on Marin’s single track trails Marin are virtually non-existent. In a widely quoted Marin Voice piece last December 22, Access4Bikes director Vernon Huffman went so far as to label safety a “red herring” trotted out by a regressive “two per cent” of open space visitors whose goal it is to “frighten the unaware and intimidate our policymakers into discriminating against bikes on public lands”.
Bike access loyalists go even further. In IJ blogs, they typically roast their perceived opponents as “NIMBY bike haters”, “Trump fan boys” or even---the latest sling!---infirm “tax-avoiding Prop 13 retirees”.
Non-mechanized trail users deny hysteria---citing several well-publicized injury accidents to Foot people caused by renegade bikers and asserting that most open space trails are simply too narrow to accommodate all user groups in a dangerous multi-use embrace.
With the debate so fractious and the truth so muddied, I recently made a request to Marin County Parks, asking for all documents pertaining to the safety findings contained in the 2016 Marin Parks Visitor Study. It’s from that survey’s data that Vernon Huffman derives his notion that since only “two per cent” of those surveyed feel “unsafe” while visiting open space lands, Marin Parks has a mandate to allow increased bike access to single track trails.
After six weeks, 408 pages of material arrived from the county along with a ding to my checking account of $66 (15 cents a copy).
As a hiker with a bent toward environmental protection and a yen for safe and serene trail experiences, I was less than thrilled with the contents of my bureaucratic tome---though I do believe the growing bike demographic deserves a fair allocation of bike-specific trails.
The thoroughly banal PRA package told me little about the framing of the survey, which must have involved intense discussions between SF State professor Patrick Tierney, the study’s author, and Marin Parks land managers, who are under intense pressure from the powerful bike lobby to open more single track trails. Because many categories of internal department documents are legally off limits, county counsel had vetted my document cache, scrubbing it clean of any juicy communiques---if they indeed existed---which might have reflected negatively on Marin Parks administrators acting in the public interest.
Thus, though I might have wished for some memo chocolate, what I received by mail from counsel was pure vanilla,
Yet in off- the record conversations, some Marin Parks insiders have acknowledged that citizen incident complaints involving speeding, sometimes aggressive bikers have run up into the hundreds of pages since 2011, when Marin Parks began keeping track.
So why such a skewed visitor survey finding that virtually all in open space feel safe?
That has to do mostly with the broad scope of the survey, its methodology and kinds of questions asked. On three occasions last year, 60 Marin Parks-trained survey takers fanned out among nine parks, six preserves and two multi-use trails to ask a total of 1168 visitors about their day’s experience. Willing participants took an eight-minute survey and answered some 25 questions covering demographics, favored recreational activities and quality of experience. Just one question touched directly on safety. It asked: “How Personally Safe Did You Feel Today?
The hot button topic of increased access of mountain bikes to single track was not broached. Neither does the survey give us relevant details as to where at each of the 17 locations visitors were accosted. Someone leaving a picnic table, for example, might have an entirely different take on safety concerns than, say, a hiker who just stepped off a steep and narrow two-foot trail where mountain bikes are not currently permitted.
Obviously, more precise and focused questions need to be asked. But since Marin Parks has contracted to do three more visitor intercept surveys in 2017, there is cause for hope. Next time around survey takers can and should drill down on specifically on perceptions of safety and “shared” single track with mountain bikes. Data collected should bring us all more clarity.
Peter Hensel of Corte Madera is a hiker and an environmentalist. He formerly worked as a journalist for the Humboldt Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Associated Press.