The Forest Service’s 30-day public comment period on its plan to rewrite the Travel Management Rule closed yesterday. A new analysis by the Center for Western Priorities found that 99.0 percent of the 134,312 comments posted to regulations.gov oppose the Trump administration’s proposal.
USFS manages more than 380,000 miles of roads and 165,000 miles of trails. The 2005 Travel Management Rule requires national forests to designate the roads, trails, and areas open to motor vehicles and keeps other routes closed. The proposed revision to the rule would reverse that, presuming existing roads, trails, airfields, and other access routes are open to motorized vehicles by default unless a closure is required by law or justified by documented resource, safety, use-conflict, or maintenance concerns. It would also require annual review of every closed or highly restricted route, and allow aerial imagery to serve as evidence that a route existed. It also proposes new rules for e-bike use and off-route motor vehicle use for big-game retrieval, firewood collection, and dispersed camping.
According to CWP’s analysis, only 0.4 percent of comments supported the revision, and 0.6 percent were neutral or off-topic. Of the 0.4 percent of comments supporting the revision, about a third supported it solely because of the proposal to reclassify Class 1 e-bikes as non-motorized vehicles.
The results align with earlier CWP analyses of Trump administration public lands rollbacks. In September 2025, more than 99 percent of approximately 183,000 comments opposed repealing the Roadless Rule. In November 2025, 98 percent of comments opposed rescinding the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule. The Forest Service is also currently accepting public comments on the proposal to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which protects the more than 44 million acres of national forest land outside of Colorado and Idaho, where state-specific roadless rules apply. The agency extended that comment period to October 6. Comments can be submitted on regulations.gov.
Methodology: CWP downloaded all 134,312 comments posted to docket FS-2026-0100 on regulations.gov as of September 24, 2026, 07:57 AM MT. Each comment was classified as supporting, opposing, or neutral/off-topic using a combination of keyword matching and a large language model. CWP staff manually audited the labels on a random sample of 300 comments, which oversampled for “support” and “neutral/off-topic” labels. The audit revealed a labeling accuracy rate of 99.9 percent.