For more than 20 years, travel management rules have provided a common-sense approach: local land managers work with communities and forest users to identify which roads, trails, and areas are open to motorized vehicles. The result is a clearly mapped system that provides dependable motorized access while protecting wildlife, water, and plants on our public lands.

The administration is moving to strip away the rules that manage motorized use across more than 430 million acres of public lands, putting access, wildlife, clean water, and public safety at risk.

Tell the Forest Service to abandon these proposed changes and keep the existing Travel Management Rule.

You can submit a comment directly until this period closes at 11:59 PM EDT Wednesday, September 23, 2026.

What’s at Stake

For more than 20 years, travel management rules have provided a common-sense approach: local land managers work with communities and forest users to identify which roads, trails, and areas are open to motorized vehicles. The result is a clearly mapped system that provides dependable motorized access while protecting wildlife, water, and plants on our public lands.

Now the Forest Service wants to turn that system on its head.

The agency is considering an “open unless closed” approach that could presume national forests are broadly available for motorized use unless individual roads, trails, or areas are specifically closed. It could also force local land managers to repeatedly defend existing protections, eliminate longstanding requirements to minimize damage and conflicts, and create new pathways for expanded off-route motorized use.

That doesn’t create better access. It creates uncertainty and conflict.

The Forest Service already faces backlogs of $9 billion in road maintenance, $300 million in trail maintenance, and $229 million in recreation. Expanding motorized use without addressing the roads and trails already on the ground would put even more pressure on an overburdened system, increasing maintenance costs, erosion, water pollution, safety concerns, wildlife disturbance, and conflicts among the different groups of people who enjoy national forests and grasslands.

And this proposal is not happening in isolation. It comes as the Administration is also moving to repeal the Roadless Rule and weaken other longstanding protections for national forests and public lands. Together these actions would dismantle decades of responsible public-land management.