Who Can Afford to Ride? The Economics of Access, Exclusion, and Who Gets Left Behind
The Riding Collective — Research Study 007
Dr. Maren Solvik, Chief Researcher
April 2026
Introduction: The Lie We Tell About Open Doors
Every riding culture tells itself it is accessible. Surfers say the ocean is free. Skaters say all you need is a board and a sidewalk. Snowboarders talk about the soul of the mountain as though the mountain does not charge $249 a day to stand on it.
I have spent six studies documenting the depth and beauty of riding cultures — their shared roots, their vanishing terrain, their resilience against extraction, their relationship to risk. This study documents the thing I should have written first: most people cannot afford to participate.
This is not a failure of individual generosity. Riders are among the most communal people I have studied. They lend gear, share rides, open their homes to strangers who share their discipline. The problem is structural. The economics of riding — who pays, who profits, who is priced out — have been engineered over decades by consolidation, privatization, and a market logic that treats access as a premium product rather than a cultural right.
I grew up splitting time between Troms in northern Norway and Valparaiso in Chile. In Troms, skiing was civic infrastructure — subsidized lifts, school programs, gear exchanges at every sports club. In Valparaiso, surfing cost nothing if you could borrow a board, but the kids in the cerros could not get to the beach without bus fare they did not have. Same ocean. Same desire. Different economics. I have been thinking about who gets to ride and who does not since I was twelve years old, standing on a bus in Vina del Mar with a borrowed wetsuit in my bag, watching another kid my age watch me from the sidewalk.
This study follows the money. It asks who pays, how much, and what the consequences are when a culture that claims to belong to everyone is structured to serve those who can already afford it. The data is uncomfortable. It should be.
Methodology
This research was conducted between September 2025 and March 2026, drawing on four source categories designed to map economic access across riding disciplines.
Economic analysis. I compiled participation cost data across eight riding disciplines — skiing, snowboarding, surfing, skateboarding, mountain biking, motocross, equestrian, and BMX — covering equipment, access fees, transportation, instruction, and maintenance. All figures are inflation-adjusted to 2025 USD and sourced from manufacturer MSRPs, resort published pricing, and industry reports from the Outdoor Industry Association, National Ski Areas Association, Surf Industry Manufacturers Association, and USDA Economic Research Service data on rural land access costs.
Interviews. I conducted fifty-one interviews across four countries. Participants included twenty-two riders from households earning below their national median income, eleven riders who left a discipline primarily due to cost, eight community organizers running access-oriented programs (gear libraries, scholarship funds, DIY parks), six industry executives (three resort operators, two equipment manufacturers, one private wave pool developer), and four economists specializing in recreation access and outdoor industry consolidation.
Industry data. I analyzed SEC filings, investor presentations, and annual reports from Vail Resorts (NYSE: MTN), Alterra Mountain Company, Burton, Trek, and the Kelly Slater Wave Company. I reviewed land access litigation records in six US states and three countries. I compiled twenty years of lift ticket price data from the National Ski Areas Association and cross-referenced it with Consumer Price Index adjustments.
Community mapping. I documented thirty-seven organizations operating access-oriented programs — gear exchanges, scholarship funds, community-owned terrain, and cooperative models — to understand what counter-economics already exist and what they need to scale.
Chapter 1: The Price of Entry
A skateboard costs between $40 and $120. A sidewalk costs nothing. A skatepark, if your city has one, is free. This is the floor — the cheapest possible entry into riding culture. It is not an accident that skateboarding is the most socioeconomically diverse riding discipline in the world. The Skateboard Industry Association's 2024 participation survey found that 34% of active skateboarders come from households earning below $50,000 annually, and the demographic breakdown by race tracks closer to national census proportions than any other board sport.
Now consider skiing. A new pair of skis runs $500 to $900. Boots: $300 to $700. Bindings: $200 to $400. Helmet, goggles, gloves, base layers, shell jacket, shell pants: another $400 to $1,200. Before a person makes a single turn, they have spent between $1,400 and $3,200. Then the lift ticket. The 2024-2025 season window price at Vail was $269 per day. Aspen Highlands: $234. Park City: $249. A family of four skiing for three days at a major resort will spend between $2,800 and $3,200 on lift access alone.
Surfing sits in between, but not where people assume. A used surfboard can be found for $150 to $300. A wetsuit runs $150 to $400, and wetsuits degrade — a serious surfer replaces theirs every twelve to eighteen months. These costs are manageable. What is not manageable is geography. If you do not live within driving distance of the coast, surfing requires travel. A week-long surf trip from a landlocked city — flights, accommodation, board bag fees, rental car — easily exceeds $2,000.
Mountain biking presents a particularly insidious cost curve. Entry-level hardtails start around $500, which sounds accessible until you learn that the trails worth riding often require a full-suspension bike to ride safely, and competent full-suspension bikes start at $2,500. A serious trail bike costs $4,000 to $8,000. Lift-access bike parks charge $40 to $70 per day. Maintenance — brake pads, tires, drivetrain components, suspension servicing — runs $500 to $1,500 annually.
Equestrian does not pretend. A horse costs $3,000 to $50,000 to purchase and $5,000 to $15,000 per year to board, feed, shoe, and provide veterinary care. Monthly training: $500 to $2,000. Competition entry fees: $200 to $5,000 per event. The US Equestrian Federation's own demographic data shows that 87% of registered members are white women, and the median household income of competitive equestrians is over $100,000. This is not a pipeline problem. It is a price problem.
Motocross: a competitive race bike costs $5,000 to $10,000. Track fees run $25 to $50 per session. Protective gear: $800 to $2,000. And then the truck and trailer to haul the bike, because no motocross track is accessible by public transit.
The pattern is simple and it is damning. The cheaper the discipline, the more diverse its participants. The more expensive, the whiter, the wealthier, the more suburban. Price is not the only barrier, but it is the first one, and it filters who even gets to discover whether they love riding before any other factor — talent, commitment, geography — has a chance to operate.
Chapter 2: The Consolidation Machine
In 1997, the average lift ticket at a major US ski resort cost $47 — roughly $91 in 2025 dollars. By the 2024-2025 season, that same ticket cost $249. That is a 174% increase above inflation in twenty-seven years. The mountain did not change. The snow did not improve. What changed was ownership.
Vail Resorts owns forty-two ski areas across North America, Europe, and Australia. Alterra Mountain Company, which operates the Ikon Pass, controls or partners with fifty-four destinations. Between them, these two corporations control access to the majority of skiable terrain in the United States. This is not a market. It is a duopoly.
The mega-pass model — the Epic Pass at $841, the Ikon Pass at $1,059 for the 2024-2025 season — was marketed as a democratizing force. Unlimited skiing across dozens of resorts for the price of four day tickets. But the pass model only works for people who can pay $800 to $1,000 upfront in September for skiing that begins in December. It only works for people who live within driving distance of affiliated resorts or can afford to travel to them. And it works brilliantly for the corporations, because it locks consumer spending in advance, smooths revenue forecasting, and makes it nearly impossible for independent resorts to compete on price.
The independent resort — the local hill, the community mountain — is being starved. Skier visits at non-affiliated areas have declined 23% since 2015, according to National Ski Areas Association data. Small hills cannot match mega-pass pricing. They cannot afford the capital expenditure on high-speed lifts and snowmaking that corporate resorts use to maintain product quality. They close. And when they close, the nearest affordable skiing moves further away, and another generation of kids in that valley never learns to ski.
The same consolidation logic is spreading. The World Surf League, owned by private equity, has been acquiring competition rights and broadcast infrastructure for a decade. Wave pool technology — the Kelly Slater Surf Ranch charges approximately $10,000 per day for private sessions and around $250 per wave for individual access during organized events — promises perfect waves untethered from geography, but at prices that make ocean surfing look charitable by comparison. The surf pool in Waco, Texas, charges $80 to $100 per hour. The proposed development in Palm Desert will sit in a desert where the median household income is $52,000, but the facility is not designed for those households.
In mountain biking, lift-access bike parks increasingly operate on the ski resort model — and several are literally owned by ski resort companies. Whistler Mountain Bike Park, owned by Vail Resorts, charges $69 CAD for a day pass. The trails are extraordinary. The price ensures that "extraordinary" is a privilege, not a commons.
The consolidation machine does not hate local culture. It simply does not see it. It sees revenue per user, season pass attachment rates, and yield optimization. The communities that formed around the local hill, the neighborhood break, the backyard trail — they are externalities. They do not appear on the balance sheet, so they do not appear in the decision.
Chapter 3: Geography as Gatekeeping
You cannot learn to ski in Miami. You cannot learn to surf in Kansas. These are obvious constraints, and the riding world treats them as natural — as though the distribution of terrain is a neutral fact rather than an economic filter.
It is not neutral. Geography determines access, and access determines who rides. The US Census Bureau's American Community Survey data shows that counties within fifty miles of a ski area have a median household income 31% higher than the national median. Coastal counties with recognized surf breaks have median home values 47% above the national average. The terrain is not in poor neighborhoods. And poor neighborhoods are not near the terrain.
This geographic sorting compounds along racial lines. The US Forest Service's National Visitor Use Monitoring data shows that 88% of visitors to national forests — where much backcountry skiing, mountain biking, and equestrian riding takes place — identify as white. The figure has barely moved in twenty years. The Outdoor Industry Association's 2024 participation report found that Black Americans represent 12% of the US population but only 9% of outdoor recreation participants overall, and that number drops to 2% for skiing, 3% for snowboarding, and 4% for surfing. Hispanic and Latino Americans are similarly underrepresented in mountain sports, despite strong representation in skating and BMX.
Transportation is the invisible toll booth. A family without a car cannot reach a trailhead. A teenager without a driver's license cannot get to the surf break forty minutes down the coast. A kid in East Oakland who wants to mountain bike has to cross the Bay to reach Marin, which requires a bike, a BART ticket, and the social confidence to show up alone at a trailhead where everyone else arrived in a Subaru with a $6,000 bike on the roof rack.
I interviewed a BMX rider in Houston — I will call him Dario — who described the geography problem with precision that no academic paper has matched. "There is a skatepark three blocks from my house. Free. Open. I can see it from my window. I learned to ride there. But the mountain bike trails are forty minutes north, in The Woodlands, and the closest surf is four hours to Galveston. The skatepark is in my world. The other stuff is in someone else's world. Same sport, different planet."
Dario is twenty-two. He has been riding BMX since he was nine. He has never skied, never surfed, never mountain biked. Not because he lacks interest — he follows all of it online. Because the economic geography of Houston placed one form of riding in his neighborhood and every other form outside his reach.
This is not a solvable problem in the conventional sense. Mountains cannot be relocated. Oceans cannot be redistributed. But the way we respond to geographic inequality is a choice. A city can build a skatepark or it can not. A state can fund transportation to public lands or it can not. A community can organize ride-shares to the coast or it can not. Geography is a constraint. Whether we accept it as a verdict is a decision.
The disciplines that have achieved the most economic diversity — skateboarding, BMX, roller derby — share a common trait: they can be practiced on infrastructure that already exists in low-income neighborhoods. Sidewalks. Parking lots. Abandoned pools. Warehouse floors. The riders did not wait for someone to build them a facility. They used what was there. The culture followed the concrete.
Chapter 4: The DIY Counter-Economy
In Burnside, Portland, in 1990, a group of skaters started building a skatepark under the east end of the Burnside Bridge without permission. They poured concrete at night. They built transitions with stolen materials. When the city found out, there was a confrontation — and then, remarkably, a negotiation. Burnside became one of the first legal DIY skateparks in the United States. It cost the city nothing. It was built entirely by riders, for riders, and it remains one of the most respected skateparks in the world thirty-six years later.
Burnside is the template. When the economics of access fail, riders build their own.
In Duluth, Minnesota, the Cyclists of Gitchee Gumee Shores (COGGS) maintains over eighty miles of mountain bike trail on public land through an annual volunteer effort that the organization estimates saves the city $400,000 in maintenance costs per year. Trail access is free. The organization runs on $35 annual memberships and donated labor. In 2024, COGGS volunteers logged over 12,000 hours of trail work — the equivalent of six full-time employees.
In Santa Cruz, California, the O'Neill Sea Odyssey program has taken over 120,000 students sailing and surfing since 1996, funded by a combination of the O'Neill Foundation and local donors. The program specifically targets Title I schools — schools where at least 40% of students come from low-income families. A child's first experience in the ocean costs their family nothing.
The Collective's own architecture addresses this directly. The gear exchange enables riders to pass equipment to other riders at no cost. The lodging network — riders hosting riders — eliminates the single largest travel expense. The Guardian fund, which we are building, will provide direct financial support for riders who cannot afford access fees, travel, or equipment. These are not charity programs. They are infrastructure for a culture that means what it says about being for everyone.
Gear libraries are emerging as one of the most effective access models. Breckenridge Outdoor Education Center in Colorado lends adaptive ski equipment at no cost. The Community Cycling Center in Portland provides refurbished bikes and teaches repair skills to low-income families. The Stoked Mentoring program in New York and Los Angeles provides surfboards, skateboards, and snowboards to underserved youth along with mentorship.
But these programs share a fragility: they depend on donations, volunteer labor, and the continued attention of founders. When the founder moves on, the program often dies. What works at the scale of a single community has not yet been replicated at the scale of a movement. The question is whether a structure like the Collective — decentralized, rider-owned, not dependent on any single organization — can provide the connective tissue that these isolated efforts lack.
The DIY counter-economy already proves that riders will solve access problems when given the tools. What they lack is not willingness. It is coordination, funding, and the structural support to sustain what they build.
Chapter 5: What Access Actually Looks Like
Access is not a discount. Access is not a scholarship that sends twelve kids skiing once a year so a corporation can photograph them for a diversity report. Access is structural change to the economics of participation, and it requires honesty about what the barriers actually are.
The barriers, in order of impact based on my interviews: cost of equipment, cost of access fees, cost of transportation to terrain, cost of time away from work, and social intimidation at being the only person who looks like you in the lineup or on the mountain. The first four are economic. The fifth is a consequence of the first four operating for decades.
Models that work address multiple barriers simultaneously. Chill Foundation, which partners with ski resorts and skateparks across the US, provides equipment, instruction, transportation, and meals for youth from underserved communities. Their cost per participant is approximately $1,200 per season — less than what an affluent family spends on a single weekend ski trip. Their retention rate after the first year is 74%. The investment works.
Community land trusts offer a model for terrain access that removes the profit motive entirely. In Vermont, the Mad River Glen cooperative — where skiers own the mountain through shares purchased at $2,000 each — has kept day ticket prices at $89 while corporate-owned mountains in the same state charge over $150. The cooperative model is not hypothetical. It has been operating since 1995, and it proves that community ownership can resist the consolidation machine.
For the Collective, economic justice is not an add-on pillar. It is the foundation beneath every other pillar. Cultural preservation means nothing if only wealthy riders can access the culture being preserved. Environmental stewardship means nothing if the people most affected by terrain loss — rural communities, indigenous communities, low-income communities — are not at the table. The archive we are building will be an archive of privilege unless we actively engineer against that outcome.
Specific recommendations for the Collective's economic access framework:
The Guardian Fund should operate as a mutual aid structure, not a grant program. Riders contribute what they can. Riders withdraw what they need. The fund covers equipment, access fees, and travel for riders who self-identify as economically constrained. No means testing. No application essays. Trust the riders.
The gear exchange should be expanded to include depot locations — physical spaces, partnered with existing bike shops, surf shops, and outdoor retailers — where gear can be dropped off and picked up without shipping costs.
The lodging network should explicitly recruit hosts in high-cost riding destinations — Tahoe, Jackson, the North Shore, Chamonix — where accommodation is the single largest barrier for visiting riders.
Regional access funds should be established with the specific mandate of solving transportation — the most underestimated barrier. A van that runs from East Oakland to the Marin trails on weekends. A bus from South Central to Leo Carrillo. A shuttle from the Bronx to a skatepark in Rockaway. The rides that do not exist because no one profits from providing them.
The economics of access are not mysterious. They are arithmetic. The question has never been whether it is possible to make riding culture more accessible. The question is whether the culture wants it enough to pay for it.
Conclusion: The Culture Must Follow the Claim
Riding culture says it is for everyone. The economics say otherwise.
A kid in Valparaiso watches the surfers from the bus window. A teenager in Detroit has never seen a mountain. A single mother in Reno drives past the ski resort every day on her way to a job that pays $17 an hour and has never been inside. They are not part of riding culture — not because they lack the desire, the talent, or the courage, but because the price of admission was set by someone who never considered their existence.
This is not an indictment of individual riders. Most riders I know are generous beyond what the culture asks of them. They lend boards. They teach for free. They drive strangers to the trailhead. The generosity is real and it matters. But generosity operating within an extractive structure is not enough. The structure must change.
The consolidation of terrain under corporate ownership must be resisted through cooperative models, public land protections, and community ownership. The cost of equipment must be addressed through gear libraries, exchange networks, and manufacturer partnerships that prioritize volume access over premium margins. The transportation barrier must be named and funded, because a free skatepark means nothing if the kid cannot get there.
The Riding Collective exists to preserve what matters about riding culture. What matters most is the rider. Not the brand, not the resort, not the pass, not the content. The rider. And until the economics of participation reflect that priority, every beautiful thing we document in this archive carries an asterisk: *accessible to those who could afford it.
I refuse to build an archive with that asterisk. This study is the beginning of removing it.
Dr. Maren Solvik is the Chief Researcher of The Riding Collective. She has torn her ACL, rebuilt a horse fence in freezing rain, and once calculated the cost-per-wave of a surf trip to Indonesia down to the cent. It was $14.30. She is still angry about it.
Appendix: Participation Cost Summary by Discipline (2025 USD)
| Discipline | First-Year Entry Cost | Annual Ongoing Cost | Access Fee Range | Diversity Index* |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skateboarding | $50 — $150 | $50 — $200 | Free — $15/session | 0.71 |
| BMX | $200 — $600 | $100 — $400 | Free — $15/session | 0.64 |
| Surfing | $300 — $800 | $200 — $500 | Free (ocean) | 0.38 |
| Snowboarding | $800 — $2,500 | $400 — $1,200 | $80 — $269/day | 0.29 |
| Skiing | $1,400 — $3,200 | $500 — $1,500 | $80 — $269/day | 0.24 |
| Mountain Biking | $500 — $8,000 | $500 — $1,500 | Free — $69/day | 0.31 |
| Motocross | $6,000 — $12,000 | $2,000 — $5,000 | $25 — $50/session | 0.27 |
| Equestrian | $8,000 — $65,000 | $6,000 — $20,000 | $50 — $5,000/event | 0.14 |
Diversity Index: ratio of participation demographic breakdown to national census proportions (1.0 = perfect mirror of national demographics). Compiled from Outdoor Industry Association, US Equestrian Federation, Skateboard Industry Association, and National Ski Areas Association participation data, 2023-2024.