Are Bicycles Motorcycles without Motors?
It came like a bombshell. On December 4th, the Bureau of Land Management-the nation’s largest landowner-proposed an Off-Highway Vehicle (OHV) Strategy that would regulate offroad bicycle use as if bikes were 4WD vehicles. If the proposal flies, Local BLM field offices will use the OHV Strategy as the basis for managing motorcycles and off-highway trucks, and the new language will bring bicycles into the motorized mix-with potentially disastrous results for mountain bikers. Worst case scenario: 1000s of miles of singletrack trail could be shut down to bikes on millions of acres of public land, 264 million to be exact. And since earlier drafts of the BLM’s OHV Strategy never referred to bicycles, cyclists from around the country hurriedly went into action. Some thought the move a BLM conspiracy, but IMBA believes that bikes may have been included because of public comments submitted about earlier drafts. The BLM currently has no policy about offroad cycling, yet the current draft would e