E-bikes in Open Space talks intensify in Colorado Springs | Lifestyle | gazette.com

In 2015, Mary Ann Bonnell and her Jeffco Open Space team thought to bring an unusual presentation to an annual conference of local land managers around Colorado. Bonnell would speak on electric bikes, or e-bikes as they were becoming known.

“We had little to no interest,” Bonnell recalls. “I think 11 people showed up. Very few people cared back in 2015.”

They care now. As evidenced by a long-going debate in Colorado Springs.

After years of starts and stops — on-and-off conversations within the city’s parks department, on-and-off conversations with stakeholders outside, a pilot program allowing e-bikes on trails that was canceled before starting in 2021 — the debate might be nearing an end. Or not.

Officials have proposed a policy granting Class 1 e-bikes on city-owned parks and open space trails where other mountain bikes are allowed. Those are e-bikes with motors that provide boosts up to 20 mph as long as the rider is pedaling.

The expanded access will need votes from Colorado Springs’ parks board as well as the working committee overseeing the city’s Trails, Open Space and Parks (TOPS) program, which funds some of the city’s most popular outdoor destinations. The votes could come next month, ahead of possible consideration by City Council — but the policy faces familiar pushback.

It’s while officials seek a policy to manage e-bikes already out on local trails despite the rules. It’s while several officials across the Front Range and beyond settled on access years ago.

Varying policies have sprouted since 2017, when the state adopted definitions of e-bikes. Legislation classified them separately as motorized vehicles and called for their use across bike paths unless posted otherwise.

Laraine Martin closely followed that legislation. She’s executive director of Routt County Riders, the mountain bike advocacy group in Steamboat Springs.

With e-bike regulations, lawmakers “wanted to really encourage them as a form of transportation that would not be bogged down in the process of needing to go through DMV licensing and registration,” Martin said.

It was about “the green form of transportation,” she said, “and not really meaning to open up a can of worms for access on singletrack trails.”

Jurisdictions were left to decide on their own levels of access. And many have looked to Bonnell and Jefferson County for guidance.

From that conference presentation, Bonnell and Jeffco Open Space went on to launch on-the-ground studies and public surveys asking about e-bikes across the mountains west of Denver. In 2018, Jeffco Open Space greenlit Class 1 e-bikes on all system trails where other bikes were allowed.

Since then, Bonnell said her department has recorded just one crash attributed to an e-bike: An outlawed Class 2 rider, with a throttle, ran into a rock and was injured, Bonnell said.

She said she hears complaints about bikes riding too fast “and not passing in a nice way.” And while those complaints don’t generally specify e-bikes, she recognized the possibility of one simply not spotting the difference between a Class 1 e-bike and a traditional mountain bike.

“It’s not conflict-free,” Bonnell said. “But certainly, the things people worried about — there’ll be more crashes, more people will get in over their heads and not know how to use them, bikes will start on fire in the middle of the woods — none of those things have happened.”

A Douglas County spokesperson reported “zero real issues” since open spaces aligned with state language. Little to report around Boulder County, said the official who led the e-bike policy-making there.

From on-trail studies, surveys and open houses, Boulder County Parks and Open Space’s Tina Nielsen in 2019 gained county commissioners’ approval to legalize e-bikes on “plains trails.”

Those are “wider and flatter, and they just don’t have as much congestion,” Nielsen said. The decision was based on data and public feedback, she explained: “We know where we have trail crowding and user conflict, and the foothills and mountain trails have heavy bike use and conflicts associated with bikes is higher.”

The city of Boulder’s e-bike policy, established last year, closely mirrored the county’s.

“It was contentious,” said Boulder Mountainbike Alliance Executive Director Wendy Sweet said, “but in the way bike access in the city of Boulder has been contentious since 1983.”

She was referring to the historic ban on bikes across the city’s trail system that advocates have worked to scale back over the years. Sweet’s group is not the only one around Colorado worried about e-bikes coming between such efforts.

Routt County Riders shares a no-stance stance regarding e-bikes. “We are completely mired in advocacy for traditional mountain bikes without bringing in this complicated conversation of an e-assist motor,” Martin said.

E-bikes “are one of those super emotional, divisive things,” Sweet said. “Like our politics. People feel very deeply on this.”

Many feel, like Colorado Springs’ mayor, that e-bikes promote accessibility and inclusion. They say e-bikes extend the mountain biking life of an older rider, or assist one with a disability or lesser ability to keep up with friends and family on the trail.

Colorado Springs Mountain Bike Association, for one, supports the city’s e-bike policy proposal. The city’s longer-rooted mountain biking group, Medicine Wheel Trail Advocates, has expressed mixed feelings.

E-bikes “are a really important part of the current and future ecosystem of recreation, but I think we need to do it thoughtfully,” said Cory Sutela, the group’s executive director.

He has long called for a data-driven approach similar to Jefferson and Boulder counties. The Colorado Springs parks department’s e-bike survey over the summer, finding about 60% support for the proposed policy, was “unscientific” by Sutela’s view. And “thoughtful,” in his view, is not a “blanket approach” allowing e-bikes on all trails, especially considering heavy foot and bike traffic around the city’s steeper terrain.

Sutela’s biggest concern regards the 1997 voter-approved ordinance for the TOPS program. In purchasing lands and maintaining trails with sales tax revenues, that ordinance calls for nonmotorized vehicles.

“Other (municipalities’) experiences matter and are helpful, but every situation is different,” Sutela said, “and ours is especially different because of TOPS.”

The legal questions posed by local opponents sound familiar to Nielsen. Similar to Springs officials aiming to define certain e-bikes as a “nonmotorized use,” Nielsen went through Boulder County’s governmental channels to adjust “passive recreation” tied to the decades-old open space program.

Critics saw this as “a bright line; you do not cross it,” Nielsen said. “It’s like the camel’s nose under the tent, and it’s just never gonna lead to anything good.”

In the ever-changing world of technology, Nielsen understood the “slippery slope” argument against allowing any motor on open space trails. Front Range-based Colorado Mountain Bike Association Executive Director Gary Moore has also heard this argument.

In a high-demand market of e-bikes, “we’re pretty good at always creating something that’s a little bit faster than the competition,” Moore said, “or a little more powerful, a little longer lasting, all those things. There’s a new bike every year.”

But so far so good for e-bikes across mountainous trail systems his association has helped create.

“E-mountain bikes have not been a problem in terms of trail wear or in terms of trail use,” Moore said. “It really just comes down to etiquette.”

Down to the biker’s behavior, not the bike — that’s how John Howe has watched the conversation evolve around e-bikes. He’s president of Colorado Plateau Mountain Bike Trail Association, the organization stewarding destination singletrack around western Colorado that the Bureau of Land Management has opened to e-bikes in recent years.

At a board meeting a few years ago discussing his group’s stance, “we had several board members resign,” Howe said. “Just because we were even talking about it.”

He said talks are more comfortable now, two years after the Bureau of Land Management legalized e-bikes on the popular North Fruita Desert trails.

“I’ve not heard of any real significant issues, from a maintenance standpoint or from a user interaction standpoint,” Howe said.

But he’s concerned by e-bikes riding illegally elsewhere, around hilly and highly trafficked topography that he sees as problematic for bikes that can power uphill faster. It’s a concern compounded by technology enhancing and enforcement lagging.

“Basically the horse has already left the barn,” Howe said. “It’d be nice to say these rules can be enforced, but I’m just not sure that’s realistic.”

In Colorado Springs, some wonder about “unintended consequences,” as longtime parks advocate Carol Beckman put it.

Could more e-bikes lead to demand for more hiking-only trails? she asked. Or more bike-only, single-direction trails? Those have been implemented in Jefferson County, though not directly due to e-bikes, officials say.

More trails “have more impact on wildlife habitat, more impact on the maintenance needs, construction costs,” Beckman said. “I’m gonna hope we don’t go to a lot of single-use trails because of this (proposed e-bike) policy, because it’s just gonna have a huge impact on other things.”

Enforcement is at the forefront of talks. Some wonder about posting speed limits on trails. Some wonder about the feasibility of riders checking their speeds and rangers being around to record them.

Some see enforcement as a lost cause and detracting from a more important matter: education and etiquette.

E-bikes “don’t generate conflict. What generates conflict is the rider,” said Bonnell, with Jeffco Open Space.

True or not, perceptions of faster bikes exist — and that matters in e-bike talks around Fort Collins, said Dave “DK” Kemp, the city’s senior trails planner. E-bikes are currently limited to the city’s paved trails.

“While crashes resulting in severe injury do happen, they are rare, and if people are not feeling safe on our trails, they will not use them,” Kemp said. “So, both the real and perceived safety concerns are important for us to address.”

The city recently closed a survey called “Which Wheels Go Where?,” seeking opinions and potential new access for e-bikes — along with e-scooters, skateboards and one-wheelers.

Such devices have emerged on the scene years after Bonnell addressed e-bikes in Jefferson County. They speak to the inevitability that land managers and advocates everywhere understand: technology changes.

But it’s best to set a policy, educate and adapt as necessary, Bonnell suggested. Out on the trails she sees happy, law-abiding e-bikers and feels proud of the decision made six years ago.

No regrets, she said. “Maybe in 10 years I will change my mind on that. But right now, I’m just glad we did our homework.”