On August 21, 2026, the U.S. Forest Service announced it will publish a notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact statement for revising the Travel Management Rule, the regulation at 36 CFR Part 212 that governs where the public can drive and ride across the National Forest System (U.S. Forest Service, 2026). The agency manages more than 380,000 miles of road and 165,000 miles of trail, and the rule that decides how much of that network stays open has gone untouched in its core design for more than twenty years. BlueRibbon Coalition supports the revision, and we want our members to understand what it does.
What the Forest Service Is Proposing
According to the press release, the revision modernizes the framework without stripping local control. Individual forests keep the authority to decide what stays open, and existing designations remain valid until they are locally updated. Four changes anchor the proposal.
- The agency would remove the "minimization criteria" that have driven route closures for two decades and replace them with a designation framework grounded in existing statutory authorities, with impacts analyzed under the National Environmental Policy Act. BRC & our Members pushed to rescind the minimization criteria earlier this year!
- It would add exemptions for Class 1 e-bikes and low-powered electric mobility devices, modernizing the rule for equipment that did not exist in 2005 and helping people with mobility disabilities reach the outdoors. BRC & our Members also advocated for this!
- It would implement Section 127 of the EXPLORE Act, requiring the Forest Service to develop and periodically update motor vehicle use maps across all units.
- And it keeps travel-management decisions with the forests closest to the land (U.S. Forest Service, 2026).
The proposal follows Executive Order 14408, "Removing Unnecessary and Counterproductive Restrictions on Access to Federal Lands," signed May 29, 2026, which directs agencies to replace access-limiting regulations with systems that provide greater recreational opportunity and multiple-use benefit. Agency leadership framed the announcement in plain terms. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Stephen A. Vaden stated that "public lands are for public use, yet for too long, Forest Service regulations have stood in the way," and Under Secretary Mike Boren said "the existing travel management scheme creates unnecessary barriers for Americans." When the notice appears in the Federal Register, a 30-day public comment period will open through the federal e-rulemaking portal.
The case for revision is straightforward, and the record supporting it has been building for years. What follows is the substance of why the current rule needs fixing.
The Rule Was Overdue for a Fix
The Forest Service's travel management system was overdue for a fix. Every national forest in the country operates under a Travel Management Rule that is now more than two decades old. It was written in 2005 to restrict cross-country motor vehicle travel. Twenty-one years later, the rule is producing exactly the kind of gridlock, inconsistency, and access loss that motorized recreationists, rural counties, and even land managers themselves have been complaining about for years.
A "Minimization" Standard That Only Moves in One Direction
The Travel Management Rule was built on top of minimization criteria first set out in Executive Orders 11644 and 11989 from the 1970s, requiring the Forest Service to minimize conflicts between motorized use and environment. But minimization criteria have been weaponized and expanded to permanently close access and multiple use on our public lands under the guise of "saving the environment." In practice, this standard has functioned as a one-way ratchet. Courts and agency planners have treated "minimize" as a mandate to close or restrict routes whenever a conflict is raised, whether that conflict was legitimate or not, with little room for mitigation measures that would let a route stay open. The result is a designation process that treats every existing route as guilty until proven innocent, rather than balancing access against impact.
In May of 2026, those minimization criteria executive orders were rescinded, leaving agencies to now re-write their policies in line with current directives.
Travel Plans Take Years, and Forests Keep Changing Underneath Them
Individual forest travel management plans routinely take the better part of a decade to complete once NEPA analysis, public comment, and litigation risk are factored in. By the time a plan is finalized, the recreation landscape it was built for has often already moved on: new vehicle classes like side-by-sides and e-bikes weren't contemplated when the underlying rule was written, trail conditions have shifted, and communities have grown around the routes the plan is trying to regulate. Even since the introduction of e-bikes, technology is still unfolding, allowing users to change which class of e-bike they are using with a flip of a switch. Forests are left managing recreation with tools that were designed for a version of the outdoors that no longer exists, and the backlog of forests still waiting on updated plans keeps growing rather than shrinking.
Motor Vehicle Use Maps Don't Reflect Reality on the Ground
The Motor Vehicle Use Map, or MVUM, is supposed to be the single authoritative record of where motorized travel is legal on a given forest. In practice, MVUMs are frequently out of date, inconsistent between ranger districts, and difficult for the public to reconcile with what's actually signed and mapped on the ground. That gap creates legal exposure for ordinary riders who have no reliable way to know a route's current status, and it gives the agency room to treat long-used routes as "unauthorized" without ever formally deciding to close them. At BRC, we see time and time again routes that families have used for generations, long before FLPMA or any of these regulations were put in place, closed simply because the Forest Service never officially recognized them and included them on their map.
Litigation Has Become the Default Dispute-Resolution Mechanism
Because the rule leaves so much room for interpretation, nearly every significant travel plan is now contested in court by someone. The Plumas National Forest's 2007 designation of 410 miles of previously unauthorized routes is still being fought over by the Pacific Legal Foundation more than fifteen years later, and similar patterns are playing out on BLM travel plans in Utah, where thirteen separate area plans are being challenged one by one as they're released. Litigation-by-default means access decisions increasingly get made by whichever side has the deeper legal budget, not by the people who actually use and maintain the land.
The Roadless Rule Compounds the Access Problem
Travel management doesn't happen in a vacuum. The 2001 Roadless Rule restricts road construction and maintenance across 58.5 million acres of national forest, and BlueRibbon Coalition has pointed out that roughly 28 million of those acres are now rated at high or very high wildfire risk, precisely because the roads that would let crews thin fuels and respond to fire are the ones the rule keeps out of reach. The same roads that provide motorized recreation access are also the infrastructure land managers need for active forest health work, so a rule aimed at one goal ends up undermining both.
Local Governments Feel Shut Out of the Process
Counties and local governments, who often know the on-the-ground use patterns better than anyone, regularly report being brought into travel planning too late to matter. In Plumas County, a county supervisor summed up the coordination process bluntly:
"We felt like we were given the brush off."
That sentiment isn't unique to one forest or one county. When the entities closest to a route have no meaningful say in whether it stays open, the resulting plan tends to reflect whoever showed up in the court rooms rather than a durable, locally grounded decision.
Volunteer Trail Crews Are Being Squeezed Out
Route designation is only half the equation; someone still has to maintain what gets kept open, and the Forest Service has a well-documented trail maintenance backlog that it can't fund on its own. Volunteer OHV clubs have historically filled that gap. But in California, state grant audits have started clawing back hundreds of thousands of dollars from volunteer groups on grants where the original performance requirements were met, a process BlueRibbon Coalition has described as weaponized to discourage exactly the kind of participation the system depends on. Groups are pulling out of trail work as a result, at the same time wildfire damage is increasing the amount of maintenance those trails need.
Winter Travel Management Planning
Subpart C of the Travel Management Rule, added in 2015, extended the same route-by-route designation process to over-snow vehicles, requiring every national forest to formally decide where snowmobiles and other OSVs are allowed, restricted, or prohibited. Eleven years later, plenty of forests still haven't finished.
Where decisions have landed, the access losses have been steep. Stanislaus cut snowmobile terrain to just 13% of the forest, closing everything below 5,000 feet and imposing 12- to 24-inch minimum snowpack requirements depending on location. Lassen cut allocated OSV acreage by 22% compared to prior access. Both decisions are now in litigation, but from opposite directions: the Sierra Snowmobile Foundation argues the Stanislaus reduction was arbitrary and cuts off historically ridden terrain, while WildEarth Guardians has intervened arguing the plan doesn't go far enough to protect species like the Sierra Nevada red fox, Pacific marten, Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog, and Yosemite toad, and is pushing for a full seasonal closure of the Sonora Pass OSV area. That's the pattern across OSV planning and all travel management planning generally: the closures still aren't enough, and groups won't stop litigating until all roads are closed.
Why This Matters for BRC
Put the pieces together and the picture is clear. A rule written for a different era, an interpretive standard that only ever closes routes, plans that take a decade while the ground shifts underneath them, maps the public can't trust, litigation as the default, and a maintenance system being starved of the volunteers who keep it running. None of that serves the public that owns these lands.
Revising the Travel Management Rule will not fix every one of these problems on its own, and no single rulemaking can. What it can do is replace a one-way ratchet with a framework that weighs access against impact honestly, recognizes the vehicles and users who actually exist today, and holds the agency to a map the public can rely on. That is a foundation worth building on. BlueRibbon Coalition will stay engaged through every step of this process, because keeping public lands open to the public that owns them is the entire point.
Once the comment period opens, we'll be sure to post an Action Alert. For now, make sure you're subscribed to our newsletter.
