As a general rule, I tend not to be very fond of bike trails. They're pretty nice for slow casual cruising but inadequate for serious transportation or touring. They fill up with hikers, people in wheel chairs, children on little training wheel bikes, people with dogs on leashes, dogs not on leashes, old folks leaning on walking sticks, and goodness knows who all else. For most of my bicycling needs, the normal streets and highways do just fine. I've been through the Effective Cycling class sponsored by the League of American Bicyclists, I've familiarized myself with the bicycling laws of the State of Maryland, and I've got a certain degree of confidence in the bicycling abilities I've been developing since I started riding at the age of eight, in 1951.
However, biking and hiking trails can, if carefully designed and maintained, be an important recreational facility for folks wishing to escape from the noise and risk of traffic and just ride a bike, or walk, or roller-skate, or skateboard, or just sit alongside watching everybody else on the trail. For these purposes, I'll begrudgingly offer a bit of my support.
But not very wholeheartedly. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that motor vehicle drivers are too stupid to perceive bicycles as "belonging" on the public street as a legitimate part of our nation's transportation system. "Let 'em ride on their stupid trails! Keep 'em off of Our Roads!" say they. It would be much better to modify traffic laws on normal streets to give bicycles a legitimate place on the roadway.
The practice of marking out special bike lanes on the edges of the roads is a clever idea that tends to backfire. Often, to make a desired turn, a bike rider needs to move over into another lane, or perhaps momentarily move out of the bike lane to avoid trash or pass a slower rider. Motorists, seeing this, get the false impression that this is a violation of law, or at least an intrusion into their sacred space. Road rage results. A bicycle never wins a confrontation with a car. In a few cases however, such as fast highways and interstates, generously wide bike lanes would be very useful.
However, roads do not work very well for casual recreational riding, and that is why I'm moderately willing to support bike trails if they are carefully designed and maintained as recreational facilities as long as nobody pretends that they serve as real aids to bicycle transportation. I recently attended a meeting where the county parks and recreation department was proposing to convert an old railroad right-of-way into a biking and hiking trail. The residents of the adjoining properties almost uniformly opposed it. I found it very interesting to listen to their totally imaginary problems.
It seems as though most of them were accustomed to using this property as a sort of extension onto their own property, for drug dealing, motorcycle and dirtmobile racing, etc. and they were very disturbed at the prospect of losing these illegal privileges. Basically, I began to realize that this was a pretty unsavory neighborhood to be putting a bike trail through.
Religion seemed to play a very prominent role in their attitude. Most of them belonged to a primitive stone-age man-god cult that regards the human body as obscene, and since many of us bicyclists wear spandex nickers that reveal too much of our corporeal shapeliness, we are definitely not safe people to have within the visual presence of their children. Also, most of them hadn't the faintest notion how anybody could ever stay on a bike for more than a hundred yards without collapsing from exhaustion, and they were certain that such a superhuman ability must certainly be the work of the Devil. They were deathly scared that we would ride by and cast evil witchcraft spells on their livestock, or whatever.
The bottom line is, although I marginally support biking and hiking trails, they are not a substitute for putting sidewalks on both sides of every street, crosswalks at all intersections, and enforcing traffic laws that provide full legitimacy for bicycles on all streets and highways, even the Interstates.
