seeing other people get effed up

[el]

Today at the skatepark, which was a really nice day, a kid on a skateboard and a kid on a bike NAILED each other going like top speed at the top of a quarter pipe. They both slammed their heads on the ground. The guy on the bike was KOed for a sec but was fine and the dude who was skating had a nasty seizure for like five minutes, then was vacant for a few minutes. Then like five minutes later he came to and asked for water and was OK. It was pretty crazy. I'm really glad it wasn't worse.

It's a weird thing, bikes coming into SKATE parks, which is enforced by law. The bikers were cool dudes, but that doesn't change the fact that bikes in skateparks are dangerous business.

[freerider4]

we need a place to bike just like you guys need a place to skate maybe skaters coming into parks are dangerous.

[el]

MMkay...

Here's the article: It's going to run in Landscape Architect magazine.
________________________________________________________

Skateboarding is experiencing a strong renaissance. In terms of the growth of participants and equipment sales, it consistently outperforms traditional team sports such as baseball and football. Many cities have banned skateboarding in the streets and public parks, and have legislated against their citizens’ backyard skate ramps. Faced with this lack of legal riding areas, skateboarders have gotten creative and involved themselves in the political process to demand public skateparks. Communities have responded by building public skateparks at a pace that would have seemed impossible to a previous generation of skaters who asked city hall for a place to skate.

Skateparks are designed for recreational devices that are propelled by gravity, momentum, and body gyration. Small, hard wheels are a necessity for this type of activity, because they are lightweight, they spin up to speed quickly, and they experience very little friction loss on an extremely smooth surface.

Skateboarders and inline “skatebooters” have benefited from the skatepark building boom, but there is another group of users who are capitalizing upon the plethora of parks. Freestyle bike riders have found that skateparks are a fun place to practice their activity, too often at the cost of the group the park was originally intended to serve.

Do Bikes Belong?
A bicycle uses mechanical advantage (gears and chains that multiply a rider's power output) for propulsion, which is not anticipated by a skatepark's design. Their 20" wheels with 2" of pneumatic suspension are designed to roll smoothly on bumpy, rocky, uneven surfaces, and to provide traction under extreme lateral forces, such as cornering at high speed on a dirt trail.

Certain features on a freestyle bike cause much more damage to skatepark surfaces than the park's intended users. Bikers travel paths that are much longer in distance and time than skaters, they generally travel faster and quieter than skaters, and their paths are much less predictable because the bike has a steering mechanism that permits sharp turns; these factors are also not designed into a skatepark. Both the damage and the unpredictable travel paths create safety issues for skateboarders, who are the user group for which the skatepark is designed and intended. Yet a skatepark designed and constructed for the potential of bikes would almost certainly be unusable to skaters, given their inferior ability to generate speed.

Bikes are fun to ride, and are versatile enough to be ridden long distances on a wide variety of surfaces, from smooth, flat concrete to rocky dirt trails. True, bikers can and do ride in skateparks, but they do not belong there, due to the problems they cause with safety, damage and crowding out legitimate users. A city can ban an activity which destroys property and causes conflict with the public (street skating, skating in public places), and it can use that same logic to ban bikes from skateparks. However, it might make sense to provide bikers with a place where they can legitimately practice their activity, much like cities provide the carrot of a skatepark in exchange for the stick of prohibiting street skating.

Safety and Damage Issues
Darin Masters is the skate shop owner of Planet SK8 in Brentwood, Tennessee, and a member of the committee that helped design the Nashville skatepark, which opened in the summer of 2004. As in many metropolitan cities, Nashville’s parks and recreation professionals were called upon to provide a skatepark that would draw street-skating youth away from their favorite illegal spots.

Masters said his group was excited when California Skateparks, a design/build company that specializes in mid-sized concrete skateparks, presented a design that featured a large concrete flow bowl and a replica swimming pool. However, he said the “old-school pool” plans were nearly foiled by Nashville’s permissive attitude toward BMX riders. “If we don’t get our pool, it’ll be because of the bikers. They dent and chip the coping and tear up the transitions with their pegs. I wish they had their own ‘bikepark’ so they would be satisfied as well as the skaters. It would be a lot safer, too.”

Masters said some of his friends have been injured in crashes with bikers at Nashville’s Sixth Avenue skatepark, which features a wooden ramp course and small wooden bowl. He said, “If the parks aren’t going to allow just skaters, I wish they would at least have a separate day for bikers to ride. This would prevent a lot of unnecessary injuries from occurring.”
Tim Kirby, who played a key part in the campaign to fund and build the public skatepark in Midland, Texas, said his park prohibits bikers, but he often has to call police to have bikers ejected from the park. “There will be 50 kids there, but they will be sitting around watching the bikers. They are scared to death to go in there with the bikers. The city has said that 'It's your park, you police it'. So we just call the cops and they show up and ask the bikers to leave.”

Midland's parks department decided to prohibit bikes from their skatepark because of the bike-related damage at another Texas park. “The perfect example of why bikes shouldn't be allowed in a concrete park is in Abilene,” Kirby said. “They opened the park two or three years before ours, and they allowed bikes. They completely tore up the coping and the deck near the coping. The city will never replace it, so we (skaters) don't even bother going there anymore. It's like a drainage ditch, not a skatepark.”

Hammers and Chisels: why bikes are more destructive
Skateboard axles, called "trucks," are constructed of a high-grade aluminum (A-356). This aluminum does not bend, and under stress will actually break. Relative to concrete and many other edge materials associated with skateboard parks, the aluminum surface will actually "grind" off the trucks and onto the edge (which is where the trick "grind" got its name.)

Freestyle bicycles use pegs made from hardened steel, and have reinforced steel frames and chaincrank gears that can impact skatepark surfaces with the same force as a hammer and chisel. Relative to the edge of skateparks, this hardened steel is far stronger. In this case, the concrete edge is ground or chipped off, not the peg. The trick name is still the same (grind) but in this case, the park, not the peg, experiences the grinding. The park surface is ground or chipped away.

Bicycles typically travel at greater speeds and weigh much more than skateboards, resulting in greater force when a bike's metal parts contact the surfaces. Also, inexperienced bikers can typically ride higher and faster than skaters, and they often hang up on, or crash into, the coping and transitions.

Skateboards, in comparison, never contact riding surfaces with hardened metal: in a crash, only the wood and urethane contact the skatepark surface. During a coping grind, the aluminum of the truck hangers contact the surface, but only experienced skaters are capable of grinding. Skateboards also have much lower inertia due to lower speeds and weight, resulting in less force when they are involved in a crash.
Bikes routinely shed nuts and bolts, and BMX tires bring dirt, mud and rocks into the skatepark, littering the skate surface with debris that causes smaller, harder skate wheels to stop abruptly, causing crashes and injuries to skaters.

Landscape Architects who understand the problem
Carolyn Weiss is a landscape architect with the City of Eugene (Oregon) Parks and Open Space Division. Her city, with a population of 140,000, has constructed five skateparks, four of which are concrete. Weiss said Eugene’s skateparks prohibit bikes, but the rule is not enforced. “Unfortunately, this can create an adversarial situation between skaters, who feel they have the legal right to exclusive use of the park, and bikers, who feel they have a moral right to the park and have no where else to go.”

Rod Wojtanik, a landscape architect and project manager, is working with Portland, Oregon’s skaters to establish a system of skateparks that attract skaters from a neighborhood to a regional level. Wojtanik is concerned about the “use of parks by bikes that are too small for the number of users already. Skateparks are popular places and it doesn't take long before they are filled to capacity, then along comes the BMX crowd and the park just got smaller.” He has seen bikers dominate skatepark sessions due to their wider lines and the larger amount of space they take up relative to the skaters.

Bikers: gear up and get the job done
Tom Miller, an experienced skater who is working on the Portland initiative, would like to see bikers step up and build their own parks, not just ride the skateboarders’ success. He likens the conflict in skateparks to the conflicts between urban cyclists and pedestrians. “Sure, it's possible for both groups to share the sidewalk,” he said, “but once you have a critical mass of either -- much less both -- it becomes a bad idea. Bikers are much safer in the road. And if you don't believe me you probably don't ride in urban areas. Bike lanes between motorways and sidewalks make sense. Give each user group, which otherwise conflicts with the others, what it needs. This is not rocket science.”

If there are enough freestyle bikers in town to justify their own park, and they are willing to endure the political process to obtain it, then their government should provide a budget and land, bikers should get together and decide how to spend the money, and the facility should be built.
Miller said the additional cost of providing a separate bikepark would not be prohibitive. “I'm convinced that bikers, if given a choice, would not go for all concrete anyway,” he said. “I suspect (bikers would choose) some mix of concrete, wood, and dirt, which would extend their pool of cash far beyond concrete exclusively.”

How much should the budget be? It should be on par with the amount spent for skateparks, but the dollar amount should be relative to the number of users the park will serve. Let's assume that the bike population at at the town's skatepark is 10% of the total number of users. The town should budget 10% of the $500,000 they spent on the skatepark, for a biker-designed park built by the best team of bikepark builders.

A $50,000 bikepark? What would it look like? What would it be made of? Who is qualified to design and build it? These are questions that the freestyle bike community needs to start answering. Then, they need to gear up and demand that the answers to those questions get funded and built.
_________________

[freerider4]

I wish they would build a bike park but that will never happen.

[el]

You never know until you've tried...

[jerrysk8]

i hate how bikers mash the coping at skateparks with their stunt pegs.

i was about to do trick on a bank at a skate park and at the same time i popped, a little kid on his bmx dropped in and i landed with my shins on his hangers (ouch) and then fell on him. he got smashed and fell on the concrete and broke my fall. i kinda felt sorry for him coz he got worked but he deserved it.

[wakesk8r9610]

bikers just need 2 learn thats its called a "skate"park

[freerider4]

wakesk8r9610 do you get pissed when people kick you out when you are skating downtown.

[el]

I really don't mean to be a dick freerider4, but there's something really wrong when skateboarders band together and rally for their own park, collaborate with a bunch of old people who want to build a "skateboard-rink", put up with a year or two of red tape, and then they finally have a skatepark. But when there's bikers there that didn't put effort into the project, who come on in, grind the coping to sh-t and make skating in the skatepark feel like playing in an interstate, something is up.

Opposed to fat people who don't want you skating a ledge, rail, set of stairs or what have you, because you damage the property, are noisy and "could sue them"... By the way, there have already been a few instances around Oregon where skateboarders who have gotten annihilated by bikers in 'no bike' skateparks have sued the bikers.

BUT, I feel what you are trying to get across...

All this to say, I would totally support bike-only parks. And I'll bet if bikers in communities really put in the effort, there would be a lot more existing bike parks.

I really don't mind that much if a few bikes are in the skatepark at the same time as me, it's when they become cocky/reckless/disrespectful that I truly get pissed.

[wakesk8r9610]

freerider4, ya but i dont run into people with a 30 pound bike goin 20 miles an hour

[chriscut]

I bike and I skateboard parks. It's not really a issue if you are careful and watch out for other people. If you are crazy and ride into hits and rails without waiting your turn or watching for other people, its your fault.

[seven11dmd]

that article was moronic and uninformed as far as bikes are concerned....it talks about 2 inch pneumatic suspension on BMX bikes....what friggin idiot wrote that....for starters bmx bikes dont have suspension, free ride bikes do but the forks are oil over coil not pneumatic. Also the article says that they shouldride their bmx bikes on rocky dirt trails? thats what mountain bikes are for, bmx are for the parks

[wakesk8r9610]

seven11dmd, bmx is just gay and f*cks eveyrhting at the park up incliding people

[BillyOLDS]

seven11dmd, i dont know but maybe they were refering to there tires, b/c tires are a huge part of suspension on anything like cars and wat not, but i dont know wat pneumatic means

[seven11dmd]

wakesk8r9610, i dont bmx so i dont really care, i mountain and road bike.....anyways


yeah i guess the tires are maybe what they are refering to...although theres not 2 inches in there to compress......pneumatics deals with high presssured air so now that i think about it maybe they ment tires

[kento911]

seven11dmd, yes they ment tires by "2 inch pneumatic suspension", however I don't think they meant it gives you 2 inches of travel, much like a 6 inch lift on a truck doesn't give you 6 more inches of travel. I think they are merely referrring to the over all geometry of the system by which the suspension is achieved, there is a 2 inch increase in circumference achieved by adding a bike tire to a 20 inch bike wheel. The problem IS that bikers feel they have a right to these parks, I have biked, and i have skated for years, and when the sign says "no bikes" you can't say shizzle if you get ejected. Skaters have endured the political process for years trying to achieve the goal of public skateparks, and that article is right on the money. If bikers want parks they need to get active in there community, and push legislation for bike specific parks. Bikers are the reason that pool coping is rarely used in public parks, and it's a damned shame too pool coping is the tits. Thankfully the pool skaters are getting organized and saying "wait we don't want to be punished, because of BMX bikes." And now pool coping is making a come back, which is even more reason for bikers to get on there own band wagon and quit mooching skateparks. Bikers need to realize that their actions ARE destroying the fruits of skaters massive amounts of labor, and as soon as some rich puke gets hurt and his parents sue the city for poor maintenece of the park, because little Timmy ate crap b/c the coping was all tore up from bike pegs the city will shut the park down. then everybody effin loses

[rukusrider103]

thats f-n bullsh-t skateparks should build stronger ramps then. and there should also be bike night at every park like most parks have. but not having bikes in parks is gay... so we have to go find crazy street shizzle to bust our faces on.. for ex. i took two nasty trips to the hospital in an ambulance from smashing my face twice riding street, thats how i knocked out 4 teeth and had 40 stitches in my face and 30 in my mouth, and cracked my skull which long term damage causes me the become mentaly retarded sometimes...no lie, and wtf are they talking about saying bikes have suspension made for going over bumps...wtf? thats the most retarded thing i ever heard. besides BMXers make the sickest wakeskaters because wakeskating is pus$y shizzle compared to BMX

[BillyOLDS]

rukusrider103, ill second the mental b/s but for real u know if wakeboarding was outlawed at odub u wouldnt complain if the skaters got it banned! its the same thing, if skaters ban together to get a park to them selves and take the effort to keep it that way than why dont bmxers fight to get their own place or fight the same way to get the park back? if some1 put forth the effort than its theres in my mind no matter wat, bmxers, strappers, roller skaters, bladers or skaters, it dont matter, if they put the effort together and get the job done its theres!

[kento911]

rukusrider103, dude... the ramps at public skate parks are concrete, whats tougher than that steel???? Bikes still fuk up steel, thats what coping is made of, I know I rode bmx for years. And as far as your crash that sucks man I been their on a bike and a board, seriously. However don't think skaters got it any easier have you ever wadded a 12 stair drop on a skate board, b/c I have many times, and my elbows and knees and wrists hurt every time it drops below 60. Skaters have been forced to ride gnarly street shizzle for years, and we were sick of it, so we fought for public skate parks. Instead of bikers getting pissed at the skaters, b/c skaters are pissed that bikers effed up their hard earned park. Why don't bikers focus that anger and drive towards getting a bike only park, with dirt and concrete, and a larger layout; most skate parks suck on a bike any ways. As far as bike night, most PAY parks out here do have a bike night, and the reason they do is that they have money to repair the damage. City parks only get maintained once a year AT MOST, BEST CASE SCENARIO, IN THE BEST TOWN IN THE WHOLE WORLD, in reality any damage done by pegs and pedals stays for years. I can drive down to spruce skatepark right now and show you 2 specific spots where my pegs/pedals effed up a rail and a quarter pipe, and I have been off my bike for 3 years now, seriously that article is not bs. As far as the suspension read my above post, they were referring to tires.

[rukusrider103]

C-unit, yea right, id rather wakeboard at owc anyway, and if you knew anything about the bmx scene you'd know there are alot of diffrant organizations that only concentrate on getting bikes into skateparks,

kento911, well if thats your guyses adittude about it im glab bikes fuk shizzle up. but yea yea your allllll right.... it should only be street and dirt in bmx not street dirt and park. we shouldnt be allowed in parks....

btw... a bmx specific park would be retarded. how would you feel if you were one of us and there are 4 parks in your state and not one of them lets skateboarders in. screw you guys im gunna invent a freakin bike that i ride behind a boat and go to all of yall fools home town and sprocket grind all of your rails....