Amid the uproar over the planned removal of the “Roadless Rule,” the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) issued a separate proposal for the most significant changes to how it manages off-road vehicle access on national forest land in 20 years.
On Aug. 24, the USFS published a letter of intent to overhaul the 2005 Travel Management Rule, which governs motorized vehicle access across the nearly 200 million acres of USFS lands. For people who access the outdoors via car, truck, dirtbike, ATV, e-bike, or side-by-side, the proposed changes will impact how and where they can access and experience national forests.
The much-debated revocation of the 2001 Roadless Rule could open up millions of acres to new roads and trails. The changes proposed to the Travel Management Rule would change how the USFS manages their existing network of 380,000 miles of roads and 165,000 miles of trails.
What Changes to Travel Management Rule Is USFS Proposing?
Environmental groups claim the proposed changes would “gut protections for fish and wildlife and create chaos for public lands users” as part of a “systematic dismantling of public lands management of our national forests.” OHV advocacy groups like the Blue Ribbon Coalition, however, see a proposal that “modernizes the framework without stripping local control.”
The proposed changes don’t explicitly prescribe more roads or mandate specific openings or closures, but reflect a shift to an “open-unless-closed” attitude toward USFS roads and trails. The agency says the proposed changes are designed to “enhance quicker local decision-making and increase access, including for motorized vehicles, e-bikes, and other mobility devices.”
E-Bikes: Class 1 e-bikes (20 mph limit) would shift from being classified as motor vehicles to being lumped together with analog bikes. While layers of other local restrictions could still limit e-bike access, the changes would open the possibility of riding certain e-bikes anywhere bicycles are permitted on USFS trails and roads. For e-mountain bikers and hunters who use e-bikes in lieu of mules, this is a potentially massive shift.
Off-Route Exceptions: The proposal also suggests limited off-route (meaning outside designated roads and trails) motorized access for specific activities such as big game retrieval, firewood collection, dispersed camping, and snowmobiling. There’s currently not much detail on how these exceptions would be implemented.
Data-Sharing: On the modernization front, the proposal aims to support data-sharing aspects of the EXPLORE Act, which requires public land agencies to publish and maintain public GIS data for their lands in a nod to today’s app-driven access and navigation. This means standardized datasets that mapping apps such onX and Caltopo can ingest, making official road, trail, and access point data accessible via mobile devices.
What Happens Next?
The Travel Management Rule letter estimates that any rulemaking wouldn’t wrap up until early 2028. However, the published Letter of Intent signals the start of that process and the first of several windows for input from the general public before proposals become law.
The 4,500-word letter published on Aug. 24 does get into policy specifics, but it isn’t a final draft. It announces that the agency is working on an Environmental Impact Statement and opens a 30-day public comment period. The public can submit comments on the document before Sept. 23 on the Regulations.gov page for the letter of intent.
For now, nothing changes on the ground. Existing Motor Vehicle Use Maps remain the authority on motorized access on national forest, and even once the proposed changes take effect, a closed road won’t suddenly become open.
Long-term, however, the USFS is proposing a major attitudinal shift to this rule — originally designed to rein in an off-road free-for-all — toward one that treats motorized access as a legitimate use of the national forest rather than a problem to be minimized.
