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@hozn 168943 wrote:

It is interrupted, though, by some property that is closed off to through traffic. Frustratingly. Today I took a detour around this on the Potomac Heritage trail (right along the river), which was really wonderful singletrack. (I can see, though, that it need to be very dry, as even now – so many days after it has rained – there were a couple of soft spots.)

My girlfriend and I have hiked those trails a lot (Seneca Tract to Riverbend along the Potomac Heritage trail is an absolute gem of a hiking trail, almost totally unused and very remote feeling and lovely). I do believe that the PHT and most of the stuff in Seneca Tract are technically closed to biking. It looks like you mostly rode the gravel access trail for the water facility though.

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@lordofthemark 168737 wrote:

I do want to ask LE, etc to go easy on people who forget they are using an ebike.

If you’re riding an e-bike that isn’t that distinguishable from an actual bike, you’re extremely unlikely to be hassled. If it operates pedal assist only and isn’t very powerful, only someone who is really in the know is even going to notice.

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I don’t think anyone really cares about the speed issue on roads. We already have cars and motorcycles, so if someone wants to get their electric motorbike mojo on, well, go to it. I leave the line between motorcycle/moped and “electric assist” to the powers that be (which is really only an issue for “where the line that requires a class m license, insurance, etc.” is).

When we are talking about non motorized infrastructure like MUPs and bike lanes, I don’t really give a shit if e-bikes are going to get more people “cycling” if its because it lets them go sooper fast and get to work quicker. I’d honestly rather people drive than ride their e-motorcycle down the W&OD at 30+mph.

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I really don’t get the “infrastructure isn’t safe, so the solution is to turn bikes into motorcycles to make it better” argument. For one thing, its not like motorcycles are safe. The problem is that people in multi-ton vehicles operate them like idiots and society doesn’t really do anything about it, and our infrastructure for things that aren’t cars in general sucks. Tossing motors at bikes does nothing to solve that, and tossing motors on bikes and then allowing them on infrastructure that wasn’t designed for motorized transport just drags the same problem to a new venue.

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@dasgeh 167766 wrote:

The vast majority of “sins” are things that have nothing to do with e-assist: running reds, running stop signs, passing too close or when it’s not safe (e.g. blind corners). If anything, having e-assist (and more assist, like Class 3) makes people less likely to do these things, because getting back to speed is easier, so scrubbing speed doesn’t seem as sad. In other words, with eassist, and Class 3 in particularly, there is less incentive to commit most of the “sins”, and only increased “capacity” to commit one sin (speeding).

This flies in the face of what we know people do in powered vehicles every day. People will still do those things, because people are impatient no matter what vehicle they are operating, they will just have more power and therefore higher speeds behind them while doing so.

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@lordofthemark 167592 wrote:

I don’t get why banning Class 3s (and above), knowing that will be hard to enforce, is somehow worse than banning all ebikes and knowing that will be equally hard to enforce.

Its a lot more likely to be enforced, just because [motor] vs [non-motor] is much simpler than the whole class system, especially since there is basically no visual difference between a class 1, class 2 or class 3.

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@mstone 167574 wrote:

Hmm. Some of us said the only real limiting factor on speed was battery technology–which is only going to improve. We were assured that wasn’t true because laws, and something about classes. I continue to believe that the ebike class system will have no practical effect on what kind of ebikes show up on trails because it’s too jargony and opaque for the real world. (Though I’m sure it doesn’t seem like that for people immersed in the ebike community.)

This has always been my take too. All the minutiae around classes, and types, and motor power and maximum assist speed versus throttle, etc… none of it will ever matter or be enforced out in the real world, because even people who pay close attention to it have trouble distinguishing it. Law enforcement can’t even stop cars from running people over, and e-bike proponents think they will somehow effectively know what e-bikes are allowed on trails and which ones aren’t, and find time to enforce it?

Practically, I think we are either allowing all of them or none of them (with “none of them” being the current regime of “maybe technically not allowed, but don’t ride like a dick and you’ll almost certainly never be hassled”).

I’m sympathetic and all, but also really wary of welcoming them with open arms onto infrastructure that has always been (and was designed for) non powered transportation. Because its impossible to look at the future of electric transport and not think these things are going to be cheaper, more ubiquitous and a lot faster in the future.

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Who is the mod team here? I know Tim was the admin for a long time, but I don’t know that he visits anymore. Maybe the forum needs to appoint a few junior mods to help smack the spammer moles down.

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It’s because it isn’t getting removed. Most of that spam is link farming for search engine purposes, so the point is to have it stay up, and whoever moderates this place isn’t around to remove it. Makes this forum an attractive target.

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@mstone 167296 wrote:

That’s an unreasonable argument. Nobody has advocated motorized wheelchairs or accessibility devices. I understand that trying to play the ADA card makes it easier to make unrelated things happen, but that’s simply not fair when you’re talking about the safety of a multi-use trail. Again, nobody (as far as I know) has any intention of banning low speed assistive devices, and it’s disingenuous to portray devices that allow capabilities not generally available in current practice as simply “assistive”.

Yeah, I have two major pet peeves when e-bikes are discussed.

The first is the whole “they are basically indistinguishable from normal bikes, honest!”, which is maybe true if you’re comparing edge cases (a very low power e-bike versus a relatively fit cyclist on a road bike), but obviously the entire point of an e-bike is that it adds power to allow you to go at a consistently higher speed. Pretending that widespread use of electric bikes on trails wouldn’t raise average speeds is really disingenuous.

The second pet peeve is when people trot it out as some sort of ADA assistive device, and obviously if you don’t want e-bikes on all the trails you are against disabled people or something (this is a really common argument when discussing e-bike use on off-road trails). mstones response is better than anything I’d come up with, so see that.

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@Judd 167261 wrote:

About 20,000 people on this year’s DC Bike Ride. A small piece of the Whitehurst should be similarly hot.

They really should have an option that changes the weighting based on how many days a particular road is ridden instead of just overall number of trips, which would heavily reduce the impact of single day high participation events. Just for those of us who use the heat map to judge bike friendliness of various bits of road. In that regard, knowing that 100 people ride a road 300 days a year is a lot more valuable than knowing that 30k rode a road once a year and nobody does outside that one day.

There are some MTB trails that have the same problem (Rockland Farm out here in Leesburg, for example, which is closed to the public except for the Bakers Dozen race once a year, but still shows up glowing brightly because of the sheer number of people who do that event).

The existing format is still valuable though. I’d like to just have an alternate weighting algorithm that could be switched to.

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@lordofthemark 167209 wrote:

And of course I realize the difference between a trail speed limit and an ebike speed cap. I thought people calling for a 15MPH speed cap on ebikes did so because they also wanted all bikes to face a 15MPH limit on trails (at least at busy hours). OTOH I think some who the California legislation would be more amenable to a 20 MPH ebike cap, if they thought a 15MPH speed limit were actually being enforced.

I think the idea behind a 15mph power cap is to allow e-bikes to use infrastructure that was designed for purely human powered transport without too many conflicts. Not necessarily as a hard limit (since even a capped e-bike could be pedaled faster than that), just as a way to prevent powered vehicles from attaining too much speed on infrastructure that wasn’t designed for it.

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First new bike in several years:

The frame came up for sale on the FB marketplace group and it was priced right and my size, so I couldn’t resist. Motobecane Century Ti, built with Ultegra 8000 and a motley collection of other parts. I moved out to Leesburg a month ago and wanted something to handle the unpaved roads out here better than my road bike.

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@n18 167166 wrote:

Google maps, when you zoom in too close, shows property boundaries based on public records. It shows that SkateQuest has its own parking lot, and the parking lot to its North(“Lake Fairfax Mountain Bike Parking” on Google maps) as a separate property. Here is a link to Fairfax county website which shows maps of property boundaries, but it’s slower than Google, but shows property owner. You need to zoom in to see property boundaries, then click on “i” icon on the toolbar to see the real estate company that owns the property. It shows that the property is owned by Breckenridge, LLC, and that it’s “Vacant land”, while the company that owns where SkateQuest resides is Novus, LLC.

My recollection on this is hazy (I was the MORE liaison at Lake Fairfax many, many moons ago). I do remember that when the park was installing kiosks with the (largely speculative, at the time) maps, they did want to put one at the trailhead there at the ice rink lot but the property owners opposed it. Thats why the first kiosk from that direction is on the trail down the hill a bit. Its right at the edge of the park boundary.

I’ve often wondered whats going to happen when that property is inevitably developed. I have no idea of the private properties have changed hands or if some sort of easement has been established in the years since. It wouldn’t surprise me though if people wanting to ride at Lake Fairfax have to drive into the park proper in the next 5-10 years.

All incidental to the discussion at hand (establishing a paved connection to the W&OD), but I think it does help explain why there isn’t a more clearly marked path into the park.

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@FFX_Hinterlands 167152 wrote:

Oh, I see your logic. Yeah, I’m thinking about getting bike tourists and families from the W&OD up to the campground. The current singletrack trail near the W&OD is not well marked nor promoted from what I can tell.

Gotcha. I do see that. I think the issue is that the closest W&OD connection (and favorite parking spot of many people riding the singletrack) isn’t actually park property; the Ice Rink lot is private property, and I believe they have resisted a kiosk there in the past. Thats why there is a kiosk on the trail at the bottom of the initial hill from the lot: thats the edge of actual park property. But that doesn’t help people looking to get into the park from the W&OD.

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