Discussion: Brisbane City Council Bushland Survey

This probably of most interest to those living in an around Brisbane Australia or who ever have cause to visit it. Currently the City Council is reviewing management and access to various user groups to Bushland in the Brisbane area. They are keen to hear from users as to what they what they want in terms of bushland management.

Of particular interest they wish to hear from Mountain Bike riders and I guess in this case MTBO riders. Currently of the 8,800ha of bushland in the Brisbane council area, Mountain Bikes are limited to 1 area containing 12km of dedicated trails.

The survery is open till March 2 at
Brisbane City Council Survey

done.
most of the qld orienteers on AP are at least occasional mtb-ers. please do the survey - its a good chance for the people who actually use the forests to have a say.
at the moment there are a bunch of 'conservationists' who are trying to get the forests in brisbane closed to all recreational use - with mtbers their main target.

is it to do with gap creek and expanding into differant bushland areas or something?

In most metro areas, environmental scientists have got the jobs in the Councils and so, regarding every fern as precious, their idea of recreation is to build a car park and a wheelchair accessible walkway for 1km and ban every other sort of activity. But this survey actually looks like it has some reasonable thinking behind it and reading between the lines they may be looking at building MTB single track in some of the other bush areas.

Best of luck. My city in NZ (albeit quite small) is reviewing its walkway policy. The documentation records that there is only one city-managed track restricted to walkers only, and one restricted to bikers only. The main threat (not that serious since we're continually discovering new tracks) is the tendency to "improve" tracks to baby buggy standard. We'll make a brief submission, I think along the lines of "we enjoy the variety, we prefer quantity to quality".

So will there be warning signs advising human beings that there are human being in charge of machines using the bush. Great just like walking down an urban street except the responsibility level is closer to zero than it is in urban areas!

Are some of the posts on this subject in breech of this sites code of conduct. Or to put it another way are they a breech of reasonable civil behaviour expected of adults in a public place?

Eoin - we're quite lucky in that there's a guy in council who co-ordinates trail care/trail building in Cap Creek, and promotes sustainable mtb-ing. The pressure to get rid of mtbing (and then horses and walkers) from the forests is from other groups outside council.