A Blog about achieving Urbanism Goals - like walkability, density, mixed-use neighborhoods - through market led economics rather than government regulation and taxation. By Mitchell Forgie
BIKES - Recreational Riding should be the primary of the Active Transit Advocacy
Kamloops Bike Advocacy has a problem. We keep trying to market using your bike as a 'commuter' or 'errands' but that is just not effective advocacy as most Kamloops folks cannot see that as their reality. But if Strava stats are anything to go by, more than 20,000 people in Kamloops - residents and tourists - regularly ride their bikes for fun. And those riders are driving to ride their bikes. Not to mention the hikers and walkers.
I would suggest that Bike Advocacy in Kamloops could make much bigger waves by advocating to connect the places people are already going to ride their bikes; like Kenna, Batch, Pineview, Peterson, the Ranch, Valleyview Nature Park; and expanding undersized places like Schubert Drive, Rivers Trail, MacArthur Island, Aviation Way.... and in doing so will build out alot more , well used, bike infrastructure - with less political friction than we have now.
Council, Staff, and the general public view cycling and hiking/running as leisure activities. And as Bike Advocates we insist that people can use these things as everyday transportation, which the general public, as well as decision makers do not see. For many recreationalists, even the diehards, they still view driving to bike as the most natural thing in the world - despite (or perhaps because of) its similarity to taking the escalator to the gym.
After years of advocacy, I have pushed back against many outspoken bike advocates in Kamloops who get mad at "crosswalks" or the elimination of a right turn lane, or complain about jaywalking, or protest the narrowing of a road, or the introduction of a stop sign. But those Traffic Calming measures once deployed far enough, have more to do with the solution than expensive protected bike lanes (assuming we can learn to design good ones).
Complaints about crosswalks, and eliminating turn lanes are actually complaints of motorists, but once on bikes, these things become solutions*. Narrowing roads and adding stop signs create roads that motorists avoid. Vancouver and Victoria's 'Quiet Streets' bike infrastructure are built on exactly this premise. And a read of Larry Beasley's 'Vancouverism' or Vancouver to Amsterdam transplants the Bruntletts (Building the Cycling City) will quickly inform you that these cities learned from the gold standard in Bike Infrastructure - the Netherlands with their 'Ontvlechten', the Invisible Bike Lanes.
The Coles Notes on Ontvlechten is that the best bike routes run through parks, quiet residential streets, cemeteries, back lanes - and they remove nearly ALL interaction with high speed traffic. And in the context of Kamloops, they will also help to remove the political and financial barriers. An example of applying this logic to Kamloops would be to look at the "Bike Route" which goes from Valleyview to Lower Sahali on Nicola and then St Paul. This route has wide, fast car streets, and the STOP signs face the bike rider at nearly all intersections. Simply rotating the stop signs so that the bike route has the right of way changes everything for the cyclist - and would be far more impactful than the 6th ave bike lane at a fraction the cost.
The reason the City does not do this, is the theory that car drivers will just use this as a fast way through downtown now. The easy answer to that, deployed all over the world, and in Vancouver since the 90s, is 'filtered permeability'. Just use some nice planters or bollards, and make it so only bikes and walkers can go straight through at the intersections. Cheap, effective, can be moved easily.
My feeling is that making a campaign to connect our parks and trails into where people live, and eventually where people work, would seem sensible and an improvement to the quality of life of Kamloopsians - rather than a component of culture war. Many folks with lifted trucks who hate bike lanes - themselves are riders. They have just never lived in a place where riding their bike to the trail was ever a normal thing to do.
Further - the Mountain Bike community is somewhat organized, and in far larger numbers, than the active transport community. They already have seats at tables, grant funding, official City support through facilities like the Bike Ranch and not to mention, tens or of thousands of riders. Kamloops is already one of the worlds major Mountain Bike destinations, putting Tourism Kamloops and their money and advocacy on your side if you frame it right. Tourism Kamloops themselves needs local tourism initiatives to support, they are looking for them. Expanded public right of ways that connect hotels to bike trails. Slam dunk. Whistler, Sun Peaks, Revy, Canmore - hotel room to bike trail to brewery - no driving. For example a TK campaign:
Many of the trail networks have parking problems - especially Pineview at the end of Hugh Allen or Kenna at the Jail. Batch has a potential parking problem in that the primary access point is on private land, and the secondary point is in parkland (very hard and laborious to permit and navigate the bureaucracy). In the Batch example as I have written about before (Singh Street Bike Lane to Batch Nature Park) the North Shore has 30%+ of the cities residents, whose residents might live 800m as the crow flies to a trail, have to dive 6+ KM to get there.
In the process, we all get better connections to the trails and to the rest of our cities. We open the minds of those users to riding their bike to get to their recreation. The more people riding their bike to ride their bike - the more folks might think about riding their bike other places - like the pub on the way home. And the more that happens, the more folks might think about riding to work. And many of the decision makers, who do not and may not ever ride a bike, can at least understand that thousands of people do for fun, and often. The same way they can invest in pickleball courts or skateparks or pump tracks they will never use.
