Reverend David Van Essen cycled around the world—twice.

Fortunately, he never had to climb the Alps, skirt the Saraha, or tackle a Siberian winter on slick road tires.

Truth be told, Van Essen’s great journey could only have been closer to home if he watched travel shows on TV; although, it took a good deal more fitness than riding the couch.

“Back when I tutored children, we’d do track and field and stuff, so I’d put up a big map and we’d collectively add up our kilometres and then we’d get to Armstrong, and then we’d get to Revelstoke and we’d see how far we could collectively run,” Van Essen explains.

“This is like collective running, only cycling—I just add up my kilometres.”

Four years ago, he circled the Earth and he’s nearly accomplished the feat again, hitting the 76,000 kilometre mark.

He can squeak 20,000 kilometres out of a drivetrain—that’s the pedals, crank and chain-system used to propel the bike forward—on his Gary Fisher mountain bike as he rides back and forth from Winfield.

The trick is in the grease, he says. Plenty of lubricant on the chain and plenty of elbow grease after wet rides. He takes a hose, environmental solvent and toothbrush to the machine when he’s done for the day, making sure to get the grit out.

With this kind of dedication to the cause, one might peg Van Essen as one of those fanatical cycling proponents slowly creeping their way into the news, but his journey has had its ups and downs.

Now 55 years old, he says there are times when he takes a beating in Kelowna’s famed cycling lanes.

While this city may boast the most kilometres of cycling lanes for a mid-sized city in Canada, many of those lanes don’t connect.

“Harvey (Avenue) is just no good for anyone, even those with a car. The road is so tight and the cars are just crammed in. There’s no side margin. And then there’s all these exits,” Van Essen says. “As I get to Highway 33 northbound, I have to decide, do I try to get over through traffic or do I ride on the dotted line and proceed up the highway? Either way, I’ll get cars mad at me.”

Driver-cyclist conflict on Kelowna’s roadways, he says, is quite common.

For Rick Kelly, a graphic artist who commutes 25 kilometres from McKinley Landing to Westside on a recumbent bike he describes as “the next best thing to riding a lawn chair,” cycling in Kelowna means dodging beer bottle shards on the side of the road.

Still, Kelly would commute on his bicycle no matter what it took.

“There’s never anybody tailgating you and there’s never anybody in your way going slower than you want to,” he says of cycling to work.

“You set your own pace, you know? You’ve got to watch other cars and you’ve got to be much more alert on the bicycle. You can’t be listening to the radio and texting and all the other things car people do.

“But you are also in much more control of your time and speed…It’s a very nice, stressless way to travel.”

He basically got started trying get more exercise, and has wound up bicycle commuting for more than two decades.

A few years ago, the hours at the drafting table and on the computer started to take their toll and he found he was having neck problems.

Rather than give up his 50-kilometre round-trip trek each day, he moved over to a recumbent-style bike, retrained his inner thighs to take over from the outer—it takes different muscle groups—and says he’s back on the road for as long as the light holds out.

He does know cyclists who brave the winters to keep their commitment year round, but when it starts to get dark, Kelly’s out.

Van Essen and Kelly both acknowledge their lifestyle isn’t for everyone.

“I’m quite vulnerable on the roads,” says Van Essen, who notes he’s nervous of making a big deal of his commuting habits for fear he’ll be targeted by aggressive drivers.

Kelly says he’s simply disappointed by the state of the bike lanes. Take the beer bottles out of driver’s hands and his life would be far easier, he said. Either that, or take the cycling lanes out of the purview of drivers.

Unfortunately, if the provincial government is serious about the carbon neutral goals it has set, towns and cities like Kelowna and Westside are going to have to get serious about getting more B.C. residents to think like these two—and that’s no small challenge.

Kelowna was among the first to sign onto the provincial Climate Action Charter, vowing to be carbon neutral by 2012.

Carbon neutrality means measuring the greenhouse gas GHG emissions that come from government operations such as buildings and fleet vehicles and then reducing those emissions to net zero.

According to the provincial government, achieving carbon neutrality can be done by reducing emissions where possible, by purchasing carbon offsets to compensate for GHG emissions that cannot be eliminated or by developing projects to offset emissions.

For now, they’re targeting municipal operations, but the premier and his ministers continue to push to make B.C. a demonstration model for how Canada can meet its Kyoto Accord commitments, even kibitzing with California governor and self-styled pollution terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger on the issue.

Canada was one of the first countries to sign onto Kyoto 10 years ago, vowing to meet formal GHG reduction targets. Ratified in December 2002, this country is suppose to reduce its GHG emissions by 240 million tonnes per year by 2012.

Almost 60 per cent of those harmful gases come from cars, with the building industry accounting for another 35 per cent and solid waste emissions, another five per cent, according to the City of Kelowna’s figures.

There is plenty of talk about green building, including greening the building code and demanding measurement systems like Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design be used as benchmarks for new construction. But cycling and alternative transportation still appear to be taking a back seat.

•••

Our economic foundation is buried deep in the oil fields, plenty of which lie just over the B.C. border, so slow progress is no surprise to B.C. Cycling Coalition front man Jack Becker.

For him, the battle for control of the roads all boils down to marketing.

Becker is an interesting character. As president of the BCCC, he’s well known for his touring prowess, even taking the advocacy group’s annual general meeting on the road to Kelowna this year (on his bike) to draw in new members.

Twenty years ago, he was one of the ones working for oil companies, trying to figure out how to get the oil from the refinery to the pump as quickly as possible, a problem which takes considerable theory.

“I have a civil engineering degree and we were taught about how to get cars through the intersection as fast as possible,” Becker says.

“That includes how fast can you make the speed limit? How many cars can you get through between traffic signals? That was all the consideration was all about.”

Today, he’s applying that knowledge to people and says its remarkable how similar it is to plan for cyclists and tank trucks.

“Obviously, when you move people, there’s a different convenience factor you need to provide, depending on the product, but it’s all weight and mass,” he says.

Becker recently joined forces with fellow cycling advocate Richard Campbell and a former racer named Paul Dragon to start Third Wave Cycling.

The company is on contract to handle Westside’s first foray into planned cycling routes this fall.

The third wave, Becker explains, is a term he’s coined to refer to that stage when the average person finds it just as easy to hop on a bike as drive their car.

In Europe, for example, bike share programs have taken off in popularity, making cycling a regular part of transit systems in Paris, Barcelona and Lyons.

You just pay for a pass, grab a bike and go, often mixing trips on the bus with a quick trip on the bike.

“We tend to look at Copenhagen and Amsterdam and think, ‘Oh, they’ve always cycled like that,’” says Becker.

“Well quite honestly, in 1948-50, around the first time I got on a bike, that was the case. But then they started driving.”

When the 1973 oil crisis hit and oil-rich Arab nations refused to sell oil to anyone who supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War, Europeans and North Americans returned to the bike in large number.

When the crisis ended, Europe took the hint and continued working on ways to get people out of cars, Becker says.

North America did not—and that’s why Canada and the United States find themselves chasing the cycling wave.

He figures the first wave of cyclists is comprised of people who would cycle no matter what, people like Van Essen and Kelly.

They’re confident, capable on the road and, above all, enjoy cycling enough to hit the pavement, come rain or come shine, in any kind of traffic.

The second wave is all about those cyclists who rely on a trail network and cycling lanes in their city to get around.

Those people are easy to get to, says Becker. It’s the people who are sitting in traffic, thinking they would like to try cycling, but never make any attempt to do so that we’ve got to get moving, he says.

At UBC Vancouver, Dr. Kay Teschke is giving scientific backbone to Becker’s marketing technique, helping him refine his models.

Looking into everything from climate and cycling to opinion research on what would get people out of their cars, Teschke’s Cycling in Cities study tries to answer some of the heavy-hitting questions that make bikes a realistic option for most.

When it comes to bike paths, for example, she’s found cyclists prefer paved, off-street paths, followed by cycling paths next to major streets that protect the cyclist with a barrier.

Residential streets marked as bike routes with traffic calming measures are the most popular option.

Unfortunately, if you follow this line of the research, that leaves Kelowna in a bit of a conundrum.

Jerry Dombowsky manages bike transportation for the city. He says there’s not a lot of room for off-road bike paths in developed neighourhoods where driveways and intersections make it near impossible to find a clear path.

Planners are limited to places like rail lines and creek beds, which pose other problems.

Negotiating contracts to use the CN Railway corridor for the first phase of Rails With Trails pathway—which runs up Clement Avenue to Spall Road—was a major issue and the second phase of the plans would follow Mill Creek through a wetland.

Kelowna has lost 85 per cent of its wetlands, very valuable ecosystems, and the route is already controversial—even without funding.

Finding that funding for major trail projects and cycling lanes is no easy task, either. Just this week, California adopted the Complete Street Act, which legislates all streets be built to move people, rather than cars, making them accessible to all forms of transportation and accessible to all people.

It was considered a major feat for the Complete Street social movement and there are hints of this type of legislation locally.

The City of Kelowna’s subdivision bylaws already lay out which types of roads developers must pay to equip with cycling lanes when they apply to build in a neighbourhood.

There is also an annual $700,000 fund of city and provincial taxpayer money ($500,000 from the municipality, $200,000 from the province) annually to retrofit roads for cycling infrastructure.

Projects like Rails With Trails are paid for with one-time funding grants that generally require the cities to match provincial funding.

In September, B.C. Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon unveiled a $30-million, three-year program to back these projects, but at $1 million-a-kilometre or more for a project like Rails With Trails, those funds will be spread quite thin.

Compare those figures to the $20 million spent annually on ensuring cars get where they need to go quickly in the City of Kelowna alone and the difference is staggering, according to the local cycling coalition.

The fledgling group has been around since the early ’90s and claims a dozen dedicated members, but has yet to solidify society status, according to longtime cyclist and member Grant Rice.

Watching the recent provincial push toward more cycling friendly communities with a hopeful, though skeptical gaze, Rice says the group wants to see more accountability.

After years of working with the province to ensure Kelowna’s new bridge would have separate bike lanes on both sides of the structure, Rice says they were shocked when those plans were tossed aside at the last minute in favour of just a multi-modal route on one side of the road.

The structure also includes a steep grade which will make it very difficult for wheelchairs and cyclists are expected to weave in and out of the slower traffic, Rice says.

It may seem simple now, but if the Westside waterfront develops as resort property, as Westbank First Nation is working toward, there could be injuries, he believes.

It’s very discouraging at a time when Westside is just starting to develop its own bike network plan, similar to those Kelowna uses to negotiate with developers and apply for grant dollars, he says.

On the other hand, the group just caught the mayor’s eye on a plan to see an off-road bike path built on Glenmore Road from McKinley Landing through Winfield.

One group member is pushing plans for a Tour-de-France style race in the area and says it could be pitched as a tourist draw to secure funding from the province.

On another successful mission, the group is helping the City of Kelowna develop named, signed cycling routes and possibly include cycling-oriented art, like the City of Vancouver has done.

“It gives character to a community bike network and allows people to plan their trips too,” Rice says.

The idea is great for tourism as well, but Rice is quick to point out cycling shouldn’t be about pitching business ideas—it’s about improving the healthy of a community.

This is why they’re also advocating for better enforcement.

They want cars ticketed for parking in bike lanes and cutting cyclists off and cyclists ticketed for neglecting to wear a helmet, sidewalk riding, and riding the wrong way in the bike lane.

And they want to see better data collection from ICBC on cycling injuries and accidents.

•••

According to Becker, Kelowna is riding the crest of the wave when it comes to planning cycling into the community.

The city’s cycling master plan was created in 2000 and its rolling along so quickly, it needs to be redone.

Four years ago, they also wrapped up an off-road trail strategy.

Although the document was never adopted, active transportation coordinator Mike Kittmer says it informs their decision-making on a daily basis and they will be looking to add it into that new master plan when it happens.

Key to the entire effort is the Rails With Trails line and the Mission Park Greenway.

With those arteries in place, he’s hoping cycling the city will become an easy reality for everyone willing to give it a try.

On his latest stop in Kelowna to announce money for a trail connection at UBCO, Falcon threw his transportation minister’s influence behind their efforts.

“I’ve always believed that Kelowna is the one part of the province that ought to have a total cycling culture,” Falcon told the Capital News.

“The weather is beautiful. You’ve got the right topography…Really, we should work with Kelowna council as much as we can to expand cycling options and get people out of their cars.”

It remains to be seen whether our governments will follow through on that commitment.

jsmith@kelownacapnews.com