Warringah Councillor's Home Phone Numbers - Borrow their ear for 10 minutes

Phone contact is good because the recipient is obliged to listen to you and it takes as much of their time as yours. You can spend an hour writing an email which they spend 10 secs responding to. With a phone call you'll know in a couple minutes if they are not interested.

1000 mountain bikers taking up 10 minutes each equals 4.4 full time work weeks of time. They also personally hear the views of 1000 different people who use council facilities. Any issue causing this degree of concern from people who normally don't bother coucillors is important enough for council to address.

Councillors contact details are usually home phone numbers so that they remain accessible to the community outside normal work hours. They can be found here.

http://www.warringah.nsw.gov.au/council_now/elec...

Councillors also have a responsibility to represent the people of thier ward. I presume that this applies even when the public view is contrary to their personal views.

Please feel free to contact any or all of the councillors to express your concern regarding this decision. Highlight that you feel that council has acted to further marginilise mountain bikers in the decision making process by, again, failing to consult the majority user group.

This appears to be non compliant with their 'award winning' consultation processes found here - http://www.warringah.nsw.gov.au/council_now/com_... (banning access to the only MTB facility in the LGA is an LGA wide issue (p4 of the consultation matrix) and requires public submissions, letter or media promotions and meetings with user groups at a minimum).

If council does not respect it's own formal policies (the allowing of mtb in the first place contrary to its PoM and the non-compliance with their consultation policies in withdrawing access) then arguably neither should its consitiuents. Either that or the consultation process is outdated and no longer needs to be followed in every detail - much like the Manly Dam PoM. (any lawyers out there willing to endorse this line of argument)

What can be done?

The simple solution is an administrative update to the PoM to reflect the actual use of the Dam as promoted by Council for the past 10+ years.

In the interim to resolve the safety issue:

1. mark the trail mountain biking only
2. direct walkers to the alternate walking trails within the reserve,
3. apologise for any incovenience caused and assure them that it is for their safety until the administrative changes are made.

What is the safest interim option?

Council have recently commissioned a report and undertaken work to ensure that the tracks in question are appropriate for use as a shared trail therefore the risk to mountain bikers and walkers on these trails is low. However if council are still concerned about their risk exposure....

Mountain bikers are the majority user group with no alternative facilities available (and clearly acknowledged by council in their rec strategy) in the LGA. Therefore the risk associated with injury to mountain bikers by forcing them to ride in unapproved facilities (also acknowledged by council in the rec strategy) would be much higher. The potential consequence to mountain bikers is serious injury due to being forced to ride unofficial trails and this is reasonably foreseeable to council.

In contrast, walkers are a minority group on this particular trail and alternative options are available within the reserve and elsewhere in the LGA. The potential consequence to walkers is a mild inconvenience and the likelihood of serious injury due to the restriction is low.

Enforcing a ban on MTB therefore imposes a much higher risk to MTB's, risk to council staff forced to police such an ill-concieved ban and does not address the risk to walkers (if council staff have to police it then they are expecting non-compliance. incedently policing a walking restriction would also be less labour intensive for council due to the lower number of users)

Therefore it is clear that from a safety perspective, redirecting walkers onto alternative trails is the least risk, least impact option. Anything else is a clear intentional discrimination against MTB users by council or evidence of an inadequate consideration of risk to the public and their staff in their decision making and governance processes.

At the very least, enforcing the ban on bikes rather than walkers is clearly an inefficient allocation of council resources (communicating with and policing compliance for 400 cyclists a day against maybe 50 walkers a day). If I were a ratepayer in Warringah I would be asking questions. As a mountain biker I would be taking up council's time to strengthen the business case for redirecting walkers.