The Brant Cycling Club has spent years trying to secure a sanctioned home for singletrack in Brantford and Brant County, just west of Hamilton, ON. Each time, club members say, the answer comes back with conditions, delays or a scaled-back vision that barely resembles the pitch.
“Yes, it’s frustrating to say the least,” said Duncan Ross, founder of the Brant Cycling Club and a past president who has led the club’s trail committee work in recent years.
Ross said the group’s goal was never complicated: build a legitimate network of mountain bike trails on appropriate public land, manage it through a stewardship model and do it without asking taxpayers to foot the bill.
But after multiple attempts, Ross said the club is still stuck without sanctioned singletrack, even as the region keeps expanding multi-use paths and walking trails.
“We have over 100 kilometers of multi-use trails in the area. You know this 300 acre property, the majority of the trails that they’re planning are multi-use trails. It’s like we have 100 kilometers of that already. We don’t need anymore,” he said.
Proof of concept, then a stall
Ross points to one major local success: a bike park in the City of Brantford that opened in 2017.
The park has been “going great,” he said, and now the club is even discussing a refurbishment because it is “getting on ten years old now.”
Ross said that project showed what can happen when there is political will.
“When we look at the two projects, the only reason why we got that done is because the guy that I was working on the project with, he ran for council, got elected, and then it was done like that, right?” Ross said.
The singletrack effort, he said, has been the opposite: years of groundwork followed by long periods of silence.
“I’m not exactly a patient person at the best of times and we’re ten years into this thing. It’s kind of getting to be a little bit much,” he said.
The land is there, the agreement is not
Ross said the club’s singletrack plans have bounced between potential sites as it searched for a location that could reduce conflict with other trail users while keeping riders out of places where bikes are not welcome.
“If you don’t want mountain bikers on the hiking trails, then you have to have an area for them, right?” he said.
Ross said the club and partners eventually focused on a roughly 300-acre County of Brant property, a site he described as a former gravel pit and dump…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Canadian Cycling Magazine…