Pedal Powers: Hill Abell & Preston Tyree

-- In Austin and Far Beyond, Two Austin Cyclists Are Leading the Way

by Ken Martin

This article originally appeared in the September, 2005 issue of The Good Life Magazine. (http://www.goodlifemag.com/)

Anyone lucky enough to have gotten a childhood bicycle has vivid memories of mounting that strange steed, the wobbly struggles to stay upright, the scraped knees from occasional mishaps. Once basics were mastered, confidence soared along with a newfound sense of freedom to range as far as one's energy and parents would allow. The churning legs and wind in the face swelled one's chest with joy and a grin seemed like something that came with the bike.

Most of us abandoned our bicycles by the time we acquired a driver's license, if not sooner, and in our rush to explore the wider world we forgot the joy of spinning down back streets and over trails to places few ever see. For some, though - like Austin residents Hill Abell and Preston Tyree - the passion ignited by those first two-wheeled adventures has burned brightly for a lifetime and taken them into positions of leadership in major bicycling organizations.

Both men vividly recall their first "real" bicycles.

"It was a dark-purple Schwinn Varsity, what we called a ten-speed racer, that had a fine leather Brooks saddle and would fly on the flat streets of Lubbock," Abell says. He turns forty-seven this month and still rides a bike five days a week to commute to work daily and explore the Barton Creek Greenbelt a couple of times a week. His wife, Laura Agnew, also bicycles to work. "We can go for weeks at a time without driving our cars," he says.

"I fell in love with fat tires the summer of '82 when my future brother-in-law loaned me his single-speed cruiser for the summer while he was out of town," says Abell, who was twenty-three at the time. "In three months I ended up breaking the handlebars, one-piece crankset, a pedal or two, and ultimately the frame...but that bike showed me the incredible potential of riding off-road and I loved it. It didn't take me long to buy my first mountain bike, from Bicycle Sport Shop." He soon went to work there part-time selling bikes and in 1984 he bought the place.

Abell couldn't have gotten into the bicycle business at a better time. The mountain biking scene, which had erupted in the early nineteen-eighties from its epicenter in Marin County, California, sent sales soaring across the nation. The bicycles that started the craze - jury-rigged, one-speed, fat-tired cruisers fitted with a mishmash of gears and brakes - have given way to a mind-boggling array of sophisticated off-road bikes, some with full suspensions and costing upwards of five thousand dollars. Riding that trend, and the growing popularity of bicycling for both recreation and transportation, Abell has grown Bicycle Sport Shop into one of the biggest bicycle retail operations in the country. His vision for bicycling has expanded as well, to encompass the nation and beyond as mountain biking has become an international sport enjoyed by millions.

Blazing trails

Since January 2002 Abell has served as president of the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA), an organization founded in 1988 that he's been on the board of directors of since 1993. IMBA, operating with a two-million-dollar annual budget and with a full-time staff of twenty-two, most based in Boulder, Colorado, works to provide access to parks and open space; educate riders; secure funding for, build and maintain trails; support efforts to buy public lands; and lobby federal agencies to shape the future of off-road cycling.

Among IMBA's major accomplishments in recent years, Abell says, is its growing national political clout gained through legal representation, a lobbyist, and an advocacy director who spends several days each month in Washington, DC. A memorandum of agreement has been signed with the National Park Service after five years of work and despite staunch opposition from environmentalists who view mountain bikes as detrimental.

"It's a turf war - and they definitely have the upper hand," Abell says of some environmentalists. How legislation is written to protect wilderness areas is an ongoing concern to IMBA because, he says, "Some bills would eliminate hundreds of miles of mountain-bike trails." Inroads have been made in Virginia and Oregon, Abell says, where compromises have allowed IMBA to support wilderness legislation.

"I have great hope that in the future we can work together constructively with environmental groups. The reality is we have much more in common with the environmental community than we have differences. There's a natural alliance, because we consider ourselves environmentalists," Abell says.

While the turf wars continue elsewhere, locally, Abell says, mountain bikers enjoy "great relations" with land managers including the City of Austin, Lower Colorado River Authority, Travis County, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and private landowners. The miles of local trails available for biking has been increased by a modest amount in recent years, and more trails are on the horizon, Abell says. For example, a new eight-mile trail system will be built on a tract acquired for water-quality protection near Slaughter Lane and FM 1826 (Camp Ben McCulloch). Through a process that's taken more than five years, Abell says, "We've convinced the City of Austin Water Utility that we can build sustainable trails that will have no detrimental impact on the environment."

Actually, IMBA literally wrote the book on sustainable trails. In 2004 the organization published Trail Solutions: IMBA's Guide to Building Sweet Singletrack (singletrack being the term for a trail where users must generally travel in single file). This project, funded by the Federal Highway Administration's Recreational Trails Program, catalogs and shares innovative techniques for construction and management of trails. Abell says IMBA has sold more than five thousand copies of the book so far, attesting to the demand for solid advice on this sensitive topic.

IMBA not only publishes this advice but actually builds trails through its professional Trails Solutions Consulting practice. IMBA also fields two full-time professional Trail Care Crews and claims they have led more than a thousand trail-improvement projects since 1997, conducted some sixty Trailbuilding Schools a year, and trained more than a hundred-thousand people in a program funded by Subaru of America Inc.

For Abell, the ruination of trails not properly built and maintained has hit close to home. In the early nineteen-nineties, after being off his bike for a year due to knee surgery, Abell's first ride over the Barton Creek Greenbelt was a disappointing eye-opener. "I was stunned over the number of new trails that people had bushwhacked in," he says. Trails that had eroded were abandoned and new trails cut with no apparent thought to the long-term consequences.

"I realized that me and my business were contributing factors in conditions on local trails and that I had to do something to help educate local trail users, develop new places to ride, and improve conditions for mountain biking in Central Texas," Abell says. "Otherwise we would start losing trail access."

Abell's answer was to help form the Austin Ridge Riders, which today has about one hundred and fifty members, and create the group's Mountain Bike Patrol that emphasizes trail-user assistance, not enforcement.

Abell was one of many whose efforts helped get a seven-mile trail opened at Muleshoe Bend on property north of Spicewood owned by the Lower Colorado River Authority. On land controlled by the US Corps of Engineers, a six-mile trail system has been opened at Canyon Lake and a trail system of about twelve miles has been built at Lake Georgetown.

Another prize on the immediate horizon for off-road riding hereabouts hinges on the outcome of the forthcoming Travis County bond election, in which the fate of three hundred acres of Reimers Ranch property will be decided by voters November 8. The privately owned Reimers Ranch has long offered mountain biking trails as well as facilities for fishing and rock climbing. Continuation of these activities depends on whether voters approve the bonds to acquire the property for operation as a public park.

There have been setbacks as well. The Forest Ridge trail within the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve remains open to walkers and trail runners but bikers are no longer permitted. This despite Abell's contention: "There is no scientific basis for excluding mountain biking from those properties."

"At IMBA, our biggest challenge for trails is the loss of public space across this country," Abell says. "Our mission is to work with the Nature Conservancy, the Trust for Public Land and other likeminded organizations to acquire property to protect it from development... (like the) steamroller of development annihilating Travis County."

In the end, Abell says, the popularity of mountain biking "will grow with or without IMBA. We just hope we can have an impact on its long-term sustainability. Our mission is not to grow mountain biking but to grow it sustainably so that it has a positive impact on our environment and our communities."

Boosting road riding

Preston Tyree's first bicycle was a Christmas present, a red three-speed with handbrakes. "I rode it to a neighbor's house," he says. That first ride to show off his new bike started a habit that he has indulged on six continents. (He can be forgiven for not cycling in Antarctica, which isn't exactly a hot spot for bicycling.) Now sixty-two, Tyree says he doesn't own a car (though he sometimes borrows his wife's) and he commutes by busing to work and bicycling home. He doesn't train and race as much as he once did, putting in up to three hundred miles a week, but still occasionally rides in the Austin Cycling Association's weekend outings.

Since retiring to Austin in 1987 after traveling the world as marketing director of Ethyl Corporation ("My job was to put lead in gasoline."), he served as president of the Austin Cycling Association for five years and worked as education director for the Texas Bicycle Coalition for six years. In the latter job he helped lobby the Texas Legislature to pass the Matthew Brown Act of 2001. The Act includes the Safe Routes to Schools program designed to create a safe way for children to reach school by adding new sidewalks, trails and bike lanes and promoting traffic-calming measures.

The photograph plastered on the front page of the Austin American-Statesman's State and Metro section on August 19 offered a grim reminder of why this program is crucial. Ruth Young, a nine-year-old Houston fourth-grader who was walking her bicycle across an intersection, died after being struck by a bus just a block from her school.

The Safe Routes to School program is about to go national in a big way. More than six hundred million dollars has been allocated for it over the next five years under HR 3, the transportation bill formally known as the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users. The bill was signed by President Bush August 10. It authorizes as much as four billion dollars in new federal spending for bike paths, trails and related programs through September 2009, according to Bikes Belong, a national coalition of US bicycle suppliers and retailers that works to put more people on bicycles more often.

Tyree says the Texas Safe Routes program, which so far has had one allocation of about three million dollars statewide, will be boosted by as much as fifteen million dollars a year by HR 3.

Two years ago Tyree formed the Community Mobility Institute, a nonprofit consulting firm dedicated to creating sustainable communities with appropriate transportation for everyone. In that capacity he's worked to further bicycling projects in a half-dozen states. He also works part-time as executive director of the Trans Texas Alliance, an organization that helps Texans envision and create transportation systems that enhance communities and quality of life.

All these experiences helped prepare Tyree for work on the national level. In 2003 he joined the board of the League of American Bicyclists (LAB). In 2004 he was elected vice president. He also chairs the organization's education committee. This month he hopes to be elected president when the board convenes in Champoeg State Park near Portland, Oregon, as part of LAB's annual national rally.

LAB was founded in 1880 as the League of American Wheelmen. LAB is not only the granddaddy of American cycling groups but was the driving force in an eighteen-nineties campaign involving more than a hundred thousand cyclists to cause our nation's roads to be paved (a fact not well known by today's cyclists).

Today, well over a century after that successful campaign, LAB's mission is to advocate for a bicycle-friendly America and promote cycling for fun, fitness and transportation - and maybe persuade motorists to share a bit of the pavement that long-ago cyclists brought about. The League operates with an annual budget of one and a half million dollars and a staff of eight full-time employees based in Washington, DC.

LAB sponsors a program in which forty-nine American cities have earned recognition as Bicycle Friendly Communities. These are places that actively support bicycling by providing safe accommodation and encouraging residents to bike for transportation and recreation. Yet Austin is not one of these cities. The Austin Cycling Association, a local organization of recreational riders and transportation cyclists with more than twelve-hundred members, and a LAB affiliate, is currently working with the City of Round Rock to apply for recognition, Tyree says. Austin pretty much meets the criteria for recognition, he says, but adds, "We never filled out the forms."

In May, Austin was one of many cities across the nation that participated in the activities of National Bike Month, which is orchestrated by LAB and sponsored by bicycle component manufacturer Shimano American Corporation and Rodale Publishing. Bike Month includes activities such as Bike-to-Work Day and other events to promote cycling.

The League also plays a strong role in advocating for cyclists' rights and has gone to battle more than once with broadcaster Clear Channel Radio, a division of Clear Channel Communication Inc. On-air personalities at Clear Channel stations in Houston, Texas; Raleigh, North Carolina; Cleveland, Ohio; and Sacramento, California have egged on listeners to harm bicyclists, including throwing bottles at cyclists, hitting them with open doors, blasting horns at them, and speeding past cyclists and then slamming on the brakes in front of them. In response to outrage from cyclists, including LAB and the Texas Bicycle Coalition, Clear Channel has apologized to the League, disciplined offending employees, produced broadcast materials to support cycling, sponsored MS 150 charity rides, and even fielded an MS 150 cycling team of its own, Tyree says.

The Clear Channel incidents are unacceptable but illustrate the unfortunate conflicts that arise between motorists and cyclists trying to claim rights to the same roadways. Tyree says both motorists and cyclists need to be educated about rules of the road. The biggest problems are "cyclists who don't pay attention to the law, and motorists who don't believe cyclists should be on the road."

LAB once had far more than its current twenty thousand members and Tyree aims to rebuild membership if elected president.

"LAB is in transition," he says. "In 1972, LAB was the only game in town." Now there's a host of other cycling organizations, each doing its part to further the interests of cyclists but often in a sense competing with LAB for supporters. The International Mountain Bicycling Association, for example, was not founded till 1988 yet it claims thirty-three thousand members, Hill Abell says. The Adventure Cycling Association, which promotes bicycle touring, claims forty-two thousand members, according to its web site.

Tyree says the League used to host conferences and century (hundred mile) rides all over the country and published a membership directory, things that that knitted members together and motivated others to join. Tyree hopes to attract more members by recapturing the imagination of road riders. There's certainly a vast potential: The Outdoor Recreation Foundation's study, published in 2004, claims more than seventy-nine million Americans rode a bike on a paved road in 2003.

"We've got to find that dream that makes cyclists want to be LAB members," he says.

Ken Martin is editor of The Good Life and an avid, though half-fast, road cyclist. You may e-mail Ken at editor@goodlifemag.com.