It’s always going to be gatekept to some degree, simply because wilderness areas are, by definition, far away from cities. As soon as you put public transit into wilderness, you’re creating hubs that turn wilderness into not wilderness.
Best case scenario, you stop maintaining roads as anything more than dirt tracks slightly narrower than a car, and force people to ride bicycles to wilderness areas.
I think this can be solved by strict urban growth boundaries around the transit stop.
One place where I think this works well is Catalina island off the coast of LA. There are a couple of villages where the ferry lands, but when you go outside the boundary you have hiking trails connecting camp grounds.
Being in LA, the camping tends towards glamping and there are is a pretty high density of hikers on the trails. But as far as LA county goes, I don’t think there’s a place with less urban sprawl.
You can have a bike path to the forest preserve going right alongside the road. Or a tram rail.
If it’s wilderness then you don’t need a separate bike path because the road itself is nothing more than a one-lane dirt track. Basically, your knobby-tire cyclocross or mountain bike would only need to ‘share the “road”’ with high-clearance 4x4s plodding along at 15 mph or so.
![[image][discussion] Why don't we have more options for recreation without cars? I don't want access to nature to be gatekeeped behind car ownership.(lemmy.world)](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c5badb62-bef8-4e6e-93d1-d89ef597a73f.jpeg){kind=link}