Mowbray Park - Reserve Action Plan

Based it on my email last week to Ku-ring-gai.

If anyone else plans to email (and you should), please feel free to use the ideas below, but IN YOUR OWN WORDS please. Original wordings (even if the themes are similar) carry VASTLY more weight. Cut-and-pastes of others' missives are quickly spotted and add little.

re: Mowbray Park Draft Reserve Action Plan

Dear Frances,

I’d like to voice my support for sustainable mountain bike trails to be an integral part of the Mowbray Park Draft Reserve Action Plan.

New bicycle sales have outstripped new car sales for the last 7 years running. Of these, 70% are mountain bikes according to industry sources.

There is huge pent-up demand for sustainable mountain bike trails, especially the narrow low-impact type known as “singletrack”, of which there is very little less than an hour’s drive away from Sydney. Singletrack is narrow cycling trail of little more than handlebar width, and which provides the best rider experience. In contrast, fire and power line management trails are regarded as dull and uninteresting, do not draw anywhere near the same rider numbers, and result in significant damage to the environment.

The only authorised singletrack within the Sydney metro area is at Manly Dam, and demand and usage is now so high that it is no longer coping with the load. Individuals and families are driving from all over Sydney to ride it, and more is desperately needed to meet demand. Hundreds of riders use it daily each weekend, year round.

The advantages of singletrack are as follows:
• Low impact, especially if routed and built to International Mountain Bike Association sustainability standards
• Best rider experience – people will travel significant distances to ride it, drawing tourism dollars to the area. It is credited with reviving a number of communities in decline in rural UK. 7stanes is one example. Rotorua NZ is another example of mountain bike trails networks becoming a major tourist attraction.
• Improved exercise rates among the local population
• Greater appreciation for natural heritage – if it is locked away and unavailable, it will rapidly become a case of “out of sight out of mind” and its value will not be understood, and consequently I fear its loss to development.

If you were to introduce sustainable singletrack mountain bike trail loops to your area, my son and I would definitely travel to use it, spending money on sustenance at a minimum.

If you wish to discuss further I can be contacted via this email address or on xxxx xxx xxx.

Kind regards,

I'm not sure if you know the area, but it's pretty small (only a bit more than 1km along the river), half occupied by the athletics field, and the rest remnant bush between suburbia and the river. I can't imagine where you'd put the XC track and there's nowhere for a downhill run!

The priorities the council has listed are all about averting irreversible deterioration of the natural assets and looking after the Pardalotes (what's a Pardalote?). Any sort of sanctioned mtbing has Buckleys of getting through, and rightly so. Best to keep our heads down on this one I think.

Is it not possible to hook up a feeder through that reserve with The Great North Walk? Parts of the GNW trail are ridable further north

There is a track along the riverbank connecting Mowbray Rd to the end of Fuller's Rd, at DeBurgh's bridge. At the moment it's not really ridable as it goes through the mangroves at the Mowbray Rd end, and I'm not sure what the official situation is with access along the side of the golf course at the other end (although that's perfectly ridable). It would be nice to see that opened up as a link from the Epping Rd bike path to Lane Cove Nat Park, and the GNW.

So as a MTB playground I think it's not on, but formalising the linking track I think would be great.

But I do think we should only make sensible claims for MTB access. If every time there's discussion about a chunk of suburban bushland we bombard councils with requests/demands for MTB facilities it's going to make it too easy to ignore us as a bunch of whinging activists. Keep your tinder dry, don't shoot till you see the whites of their eyes, boy who cried wolf, etc, etc.

Looking forward to the "news" Rob, no doubt when the need arises we will all do our best!
As you said, it cant harm to request some single trail in any plan with suitable land.