Yesterday we reported on a handful of Edinburgh residents who had started a petition against a mountain bike park in their city. Well thankfully the mountain biking community of the Scottish capital has rallied against the nay-sayers and launched its own counter-peition to show its overwhelming support for the park.

The Braidwood Bike Park was first propsed in 2012 by the cycling charity Skelf and hopes to bring a green trail, a skills area and pump track (built by Claudio Caluori) to inner city Edinburgh. The people behind the bike park weren’t going to take the criticism lying down and have received overwhelming support since the launch of its online campaign this morning.

The petition says: “we are doing way more than just creating a cool new bike play space:

We are also cleaning up a potentially lovely but badly neglected woodland and turning it back into a green space that everyone, young and old, will actually use, spend time in & enjoy. Specifically we are:

• Cleaning up all the rubbish, dog mess etc
• Getting rid of all the needles so the woods are safe again for kids & dogs to play in again
• Planting 200 new native species & fruit trees
• Installing 30 bird & bat boxes
• Installing new benches & rubbish bins
• Improving footpaths for dog walkers & runners”

All of which seems pretty hard to argue with! The good news is that this petition already has more signatures than the original petition and, judging from the comments, the signatures have come from local residents as well as mountain bikers,

You can add your support to the cause here.