Speeding: Reason No. 1 ‘multiuse trails’ are a bad idea
Over a three-hour period last Sunday, Dodge County Sheriff’s deputies issued warnings – no tickets, unfortunately – to 10 ATV and snowmobile riders speeding on the Wild Goose State Trail, according to an article based on a sheriff’s department press release in today’s Fond du Lac Reporter.
The short piece points out that the Wild Goose Trail – a 34-mile crushed limestone rail-trail between Juneau in Dodge County and the city of Fond du Lac, and skirting the western edge of the Horicon Marsh National Wildlife Refuge – “is a multiple use trail used year round for walking, cross-country skiing, ATVs and snowmobiling.”
The speed trap was a response to complaints the sheriff’s office receives from nonmotorized users every year.
Although state law requires ATVers and snowmobilers to slow to 10 mph when within 100 feet of another person, the motorized users issued warnings were traveling 14 to 28 mph. If nearly three times the speed limit doesn’t sound very fast to you, consider the fact that that would still constitue speeding in a car on most residential streets – streets the Wild Goose hikers and bicyclists are not traveling so as to get away from motorized traffic and closer to nature.
A year ago, silent sports enthusiasts in Fond du Lac County successfully fended off an outrageously greedy attempt by ATVers to get access to all nonmotorized state trails within the county. The hikers, bikers and skiers lost a subsequent fight, however, to keep ATVs off the Eisenbahn Trail in the winter when conditions are not conducive to snowmobiling, which has been allowed there.
Motorized and nonmotorized trail users are still mixing it up on the Wild Goose despite Dodge County recreation enforcement officer Mike Matoushek pointing out that “the last thing we need is for a pedestrian to be struck, injured or killed by a snowmobile or ATV.”
The fact that there any self-propelled users of the trail to complain about speeding motorheads at all is worth noting. Multiuse trails that allow ATVs tend to become defacto ATV trails because of what the DNR calls “asymmetrical recreation conflict.”
As the DNR’s 2005-2010 SCORP report states, “It is evident that ATV riding is incompatible with every other land-based activity but snowmobiling. Hiking, on the other hand, is supplementary or complementary with all other activities.”
ATVers and snowmobilers, accustomed to the noise and speed they generate and wearing helmets that muffle that engine noise and narrow their line of sight, are not affected in the least by the presence of walkers and cyclists. Silent sports enthusiasts, however, who prefer to hear their own footsteps, breathing and the natural world, are and will be driven away by the presence of ATVers. The only question is whether someone gets hurt or killed before the hikers and bikers leave for good.
It is the contention of an increasing number of silent sports advocates, myself included, that “multiuse” trails are a myth; a cannard promoted primarily by ATVers to fool public officials into thinking “no one will be excluded.” But as incompatible as motorized and nonmotorized users are, the latter have little choice but to cede ground to the former.
ATVers seeking access to nonmotorized trails – be they the Badger, Eisenbahn, Gandy Dancer, Seymour-New London, Amery-Dresser state trails and Ice Age Scenic Trail, among others – by getting them designated “multiuse” are simply stealing trails from the vast majority of users, insulting the public’s intelligence and jeopardizing its well being.
– Joel Patenaude