Motorist trail
In Germany , circular hiking trails with a length of between one and twenty kilometers are marked with special signposts as car driver 's trail (or A-trail for short) .
history
In the first half of the 20th century marked trails lead mostly as so-called target trails usually to and from places which means iron or trams were well served by the local transport networks. The private transport for the purpose of participation in recreational activities was rather insignificant, so that the majority in this connection by means of public transport was dependent.
Individual hikers, the groups of the hiking clubs and the hiking movement popular at the time, as well as the numerous family excursionists usually took public transport to the beginning of their hiking route, hiked the marked path to its end and then went back with other public transport.
With the increasing motorization of large parts of the population and the simultaneous withdrawal of rail-based public transport from the area, these destination hiking trails became increasingly less attractive due to the increasingly poor accessibility of the starting and destination points. The usual distances of strollers were also increasingly felt to be too long. In the 1960s, several hiking clubs such. For example, the Sauerland Mountain Association countered this negative development in cooperation with the ADAC with the common idea of the motorist circular route.
The concept envisaged the creation of special parking spaces, from which several circular hiking trails of different lengths and degrees of difficulty start. These parking spaces for hikers were also included in the German road traffic regulations in the form of panel 317 . By creating circular hiking trails instead of the previously predominant target hiking trails, the problem of the different arrival and departure to the hiking trails has been resolved. The hiker could start the hike at any point on the path and then rely on being guided back to his starting point (and vehicle) towards the end of the path.
These hiking trails have been provided with a newly designed uniform signpost, which on the one hand guides the non-local user safely back to their starting point and on the other allows lateral entrants to enter at any point and also directly identifies the hiking trail as a motorist circular trail. The letter A (for motorists' circular route) combined with a counting number, for example A1 , A2 , A3 ... etc., was chosen as a sign .
At the hikers' parking lots, overview boards often explain the length and course of the motorist circular hiking trails. Within a township or even smaller parts of a recreation area, there are often several different motorist trails with the same index number. However, these do not touch or cross each other, so that a designated path is always clear. Increasingly, motorists' hiking trails are being marked in both directions. The motorist circular hiking trails are recorded in hiking maps as the type of local hiking trails that is common today . In Germany, several hundred thousand kilometers are marked as motorist circular hiking trails in the landscape.
