Local Club 1st in State to Adopt a Bike Path

A Ventura County bicycle club on Thursday became the first group in California to adopt a stretch of bike path as part of a new state program aimed at keeping bike paths free of litter and debris.

The Oxnard-Ventura Bicycle Club has committed itself to sweeping up dirt, shoveling gravel, clearing away weeds and shrubs and picking up litter for the next two years on 1.2 miles of asphalt path that runs along the Ventura Freeway just north of Emma Wood State Beach.

Jack Hallin, Caltrans deputy director of the area covering Ventura and Los Angeles counties, said the club is the first group in California to take part in the newly formed Adopt-a-Bike-Path program.

“We hope their enthusiasm will spread to other bike groups,” Hallin said.

Modeled after the Adopt-a-Highway program started by Caltrans three years ago, the Adopt-a-Bike-Path program allows individual, club and corporate sponsors to pledge to keep a portion of the state’s bike paths in good condition over a two-year period.

In return, Caltrans supplies the volunteer workers with hard hats, orange vests, trash bags, brooms and shovels and erects a sign proclaiming that the group has adopted that stretch of bike path. The signs give participating organizations prominent recognition and a sense of community involvement, Hallin said.

The Adopt-a-Bike-Path program differs slightly from the highway program because the emphasis is more on clearing away brush, dirt and other debris than on picking up litter, Hallin said.

“Bicyclists are not trashers,” Hallin said. “The most you’ll see once in a while is a banana peel.”

The Oxnard-Ventura Bicycle Club became Adopt-a-Bike-Path’s first sponsor because the group expressed an interest in helping to start the program, Hallin said. The group, with 170 members from throughout western Ventura County, started cleaning up the path voluntarily two years ago, said Dan Love, the club’s president.

After particularly heavy rains in March, 1991, six inches of gravel and dirt washed onto parts of the path, creating a hazardous condition, Love said.

“At 15 m.p.h., all you can do on those skinny tires is hang on and pray you don’t go down,” Love said.

The group decided shortly after that to clean the path themselves, recruiting a corps of 12 volunteers to do the work, Love said.

Although maintenance of the path officially is the responsibility of Caltrans, bike paths statewide are cleaned only sporadically because workers are busy with higher-priority duties, such as filling potholes and cleaning graffiti from freeway signs, Hallin said.

Hallin estimates that the bicycle club’s work will save Caltrans $2,000 in maintenance costs annually.

“It doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it adds up,” he said.

The 1.2-mile segment near Emma Wood State Beach is the only bike path owned by Caltrans in Ventura and Los Angeles counties, but there are about 110 more miles of path throughout the state that are designated solely for bikes and maintained by Caltrans, said Helen Ortiz, a Caltrans spokeswoman. Those paths are available for adoption as well, she said.

Participants must obtain a permit from Caltrans that allows them to take over maintenance duties for two years, Ortiz said. A permit will be revoked, however, if Caltrans officials determine that the sponsoring organization is not living up to its commitment, Ortiz said.

Only three permits out of 256 issued in the Adopt-a-Highway program for Ventura and Los Angeles have been revoked for noncompliance, Ortiz said. “I think that shows that people are dedicated to the program.”