
Bike Sense
Bike Sense: the podcast of The BC Cycling Coalition.
Join Host Peter Ladner as he interviews guests to talk about all things related to cycling advocacy, education, and road safety in BC. Listen to stories that can influence changes that make active transportation and mobility safer, more equitable, and more accessible, so we can meet our climate, health, social justice, tourism and economic development goals.
Please visit our website at bccycling.ca to find out more about what the BC Cycling Coalition is doing and how you can join and support us.
Bike Sense
Trials and Tribulations on the Trans-Canada Trail
Conflicts between motorized vehicles (ATVs, dirt bikes) and non-motorized users (cyclists, hikers) present ongoing challenges for multi-use trails – particularly when the trail spans almost 30,000km! Trails BC Director Léon Lebrun shares his 29-year journey with the Trans-Canada Trail, revealing how this ambitious project went from concept to reality while still facing significant challenges in British Columbia.
We also explore the evolution of trail management from grassroots engagement to centralized control, with Léon advocating for a return to more local involvement and partnership.
You can find out about the Trans Canada Trail and other BC Trails at TrailsBC.ca.
To get involved contact Léon at LebrunL@telus.net.
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Welcome to Bike Sense, the BC Cycling Coalition's podcast, where we talk about all things related to active transportation advocacy in BC. I'm your host, Peter Ladner, Chair of the Board of the BC Cycling Coalition. I hope you enjoy the show. Today we're going to talk about the longest multi-use trail in the world, better known in our parts as the Trans-Canada Trail, and it's the result of the work of many people over many years. But perhaps in BC nobody has worked harder on this trail for more years than my guest today, Léon Lebrun, or in French, Léon Lebrun, 1995, as a school teacher, and at that point he was a school principal, and he's also been a festival organizer and he now is a director of Trails, bc.
Speaker 2:Welcome, léon.
Speaker 1:Good afternoon, Léon. You say you were a festival organizer. What festival did you organize?
Speaker 2:Oh well, I belonged to an organization called Société Maillard-Ville and as a member of this organization and I was a school principal at the time we decided to found a festival called the Festival du Bois. Oh yeah, and this is in Maillard-ardville, so in Mallardville. So at that time Mallardville was really quite French. When I went to school here in Mallardville, I spoke only French to start with, and at home we only spoke French, even though I was raised here in British Columbia, in this community called Mayerville.
Speaker 1:Does the Trans-Canada Trail go through Mayerville?
Speaker 2:No, it doesn't actually.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:But I mean, coquitlam is quite of course. Mayerville is in Coquitlam, and so it's in Coquitlam. It's quite large actually, and so the trail itself doesn't go through that community. No, not at all.
Speaker 1:How did you get involved with the Trans-Canada Trail? You must have fallen in love with it in some way to have devoted all these years, 29 years of involvement with it. How did that start?
Speaker 2:Well, I guess I retired when I was 55 years of age, years of age, and soon after, when I'm turning 56.
Speaker 2:I went to the Canada Trust at the time and at that, and found there that there was a brochure called the Trans-Canada Trail Concept so I picked it up and phoned the people there, because I've always been interested in trails and always brought the students and so on out to experience the wilderness and so on, and I thought, well, that's something I can do as a retired person and it turned out to be my career for the next 29 years.
Speaker 1:Are you a cyclist more or a hiker more, or just love the outdoors?
Speaker 2:Well, I've been more of a hiker, I guess, but I've cycled a lot. I've led cyclists a lot.
Speaker 1:I've led cyclists, I've put out in our website for people and discovered, when these people would join me, how little they knew about their own community and is cycling on the Trans-Canada Trail a way to learn about your community?
Speaker 2:Yes, I really believe that the best way to learn about your community is to first of all take your time, try to see what's around you, and the best way to do that, of course, if you're in nature as much as possible, of course, going through urban areas there's a lot of interesting things that people can stop and appreciate. In fact, our communities are very, very varied, and when people start realizing that there are more things to see than to just watch the ground as you're cycling away or walking, so could you describe how the trail works?
Speaker 1:Because it's not just a trail through the woods that goes across Canada. It mixes up, it goes through cities, it's all different forms. How does it work in the parts that you've worked on it?
Speaker 2:well, I started this in 1996 and at that point we didn't have much of an idea what that trail was going to look like, because it's really equestrians that started the whole idea and the first thought was to hike really is what we were thinking about. So I started to explore all these trails, like the Bidding Powell Trail, the Centennial Trail, that kind of thing, the Ben Powell Trail, the Centennial Trail, that kind of thing, and there was this realization all of a sudden is that we weren't meeting the people when we were doing that kind of thing. It tended to be a solitary kind of thing, and so all of a sudden we had this idea that really our trails should connect our community somehow. And the realization was especially here in British Columbia is that our communities were not connected. Suggest a trail to connect with the next community.
Speaker 2:We had to go and go to their maps. In other words, they concentrated on their own maps and if they had any trails there and of course they always did in communities such as this they kind of didn't think about the idea that they would somehow connect with other communities. So the whole idea of the Trans-Canada Trail was to connect communities and over time we started to learn about our First Nations as well, because a lot of these maps that we were looking at there were holes that were where the bands lived in their reserves, and so there was an attempt here to try to connect with First Nations. And it's in recent times where we're really making some strides with that, with a program that, with that, we call the Great Blue Heron Way.
Speaker 1:We won't get into a lot of detail the Great Blue Heron Way because that's a whole podcast in itself. But let me ask you generally do you think that the trail has in fact connected communities?
Speaker 2:Yes, as a matter of fact, I think we were very successful in doing that, and one of the ways, of course, is to use the regional districts along the way and having them help coordinate that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:And of course, regional districts think about connecting communities. So that was a good place to start, and it was the regional districts that would bring the representatives from each community to say, okay, what do you think about the Trans-Canada Trail, in a way, and and at that time I was ready to suggest how we might connect, and so the community say, through Metro Vancouver Regional Districts and the Fraser Valley Regional District, where I live, they jumped at the idea, actually, jumped at the idea, actually, and and so the way we managed to get started is to first of all explore all the various trails that were in these communities and then go to the planners and say what, what do you think about this? And of course, you can't get the planners to work until you talk to the councils, so they would invite us planners to work on this with us. So they were outside all the way. As a matter of fact, when it came to selling the idea of the Trans-Canada Trail, there was no selling to do Right away. People say well, of course.
Speaker 1:And who paid for it? I'm assuming there would be a lot of different funding sources, but did you have to find money in order to attract interest from these municipalities and regional districts?
Speaker 2:Well, it works in a variety of ways. For sure, you need funding to do this kind of thing, but when you're presenting to the communities, they have their own infrastructure and we would suggest what already exists to start with. So and say, well, now we need to close some gaps in between that and try to get these communities to close the gaps. And we're still doing that to this day.
Speaker 1:The Trans Canada Trail Foundation now is. They give out grants for people of all different types of organizations to do these trails and they are working on the parts of the Castle Garden Nelson Trail. They help pay for a separated bike lane between Pandora and Government Street, right in the city of Victoria, and they are they are working on a trail between Ladysmith and Chimenas all over the province. Would you say that the Trans-Canada Trail is now complete?
Speaker 2:Definitely not, far from it, I would say. However, there are provinces that are doing better than us. Quebec is a real good example of that. Prince Edward Island has done a magnificent job. They have a complete trail from one end of the province to the other. In Quebec, they've completed their trail as well, so those are the only two provinces that really have successfully done that. In British Columbia, we have huge gaps and, as you probably know, in British Columbia we have a lot of public land. In British Columbia, we have a lot of public land, and so it's not just a question of trying to make these connections between these communities. Somehow we have to get government involved and so on, and a huge percentage of British Columbia is crown land or public land. Now, some of it is in parks and we take advantage of that, but on the whole, there are some really very big gaps. There are some really very big gaps, and to try to close those gaps would take an awful lot of funding and it takes a lot of resources.
Speaker 1:Well, you're a director of Trails BC and I know Trails BC has taken this on. What is it that Trails BC can do and is doing to help fill these gaps and fulfill the goal of the TransCanada Trail?
Speaker 2:Well, like any organization, we do a lot of lobbying, of course, lobbying, of course. The biggest problem that we have is who will be using these trails and how compatible these trails are for all users. And we know that to this day. This is quite a challenge because, first of all, since we started this whole idea, trails were kind of sort of single-use. You know single uses. So you might have been on a bike trail, you might have been on a motorized dirt bike, but most of the people at that time thought of trails as hikers. So we were basically hikers. And so, with the TransCanada Trail, this whole idea of multi-use trail was kind of a new concept. It really did not exist before, and this is where we got the idea. Oh, with the multi-use trail, we can connect communities much better and, of course, we get the people involved. So that's what. So this is what we set out to do, this was our mission, and but a big part of our mission is that we wanted it to be a natural trail as much as possible. Again, like I mentioned before, when it comes to connecting these trails and the multi-use trail, you want to experience as much as possible.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, not all uses are compatible for all surfaces where we have trails. And you know, there are places where trails get overpopulated by walkers. As you know, going around Stanley Park, for example, we have a situation where we have a multi-use trail but we separated the cyclists from the walkers along the seawall. Well, that's kind of the idea that we had in mind, and wherever we are on urban areas, the idea of motorized trails such as ATVs and dirt bikes and 4x4s and all that kind of thing, we're not nearly as it's not that much of a problem most of the time, but the moment that we're on Crown Land we're into a different world. There's a kind of a free-for-all that goes out there and there's an idea that wherever you can run your vehicle you will do so. Then you will do so.
Speaker 1:I noticed in the literature provided by the Trans-Canada Trail Society that it originally started out as, and one of their goals is to promote and advocate for active transportation, and they very reluctantly it seems started allowing motorized transit, atvs and dirt bikes and such on sections of the trail. But, as you say, they make it very difficult. I think once a motorized vehicle gets on the trail they take it over because other people don't want to be on there when there's a motorcycle whipping by, or when it all gets chewed up by big tires and it's unsafe for hikers and so on. Up by big tires and it's unsafe for hikers, and so on. So it sounds like that this is a pretty tough issue. Who resolves this issue? Is it just hikers standing in the middle of the trail saying you shall not pass to dirt bikes? Or the dirt bikes just say, forget it, we're here and we're going to be here to stay.
Speaker 2:We're here and we're going to be here to stay. Well, first of all, we have to come to the realization that we are incompatible most of the time when it comes to trails, but they can have their own trails and we have to understand that. We're in a big country here that has a lot of resource roads that people can use and we can share those resource roads. So that's a way of doing it. These trails, in other words, these motorized vehicles, might turn the trail into mud or potholes or tracks. If you take your bike on such a trail, you're not looking at the environment, you're paying attention to where you're riding, and not only that, it becomes so difficult that it discourages you from doing that kind of activity. So we are, in fact, incompatible for most situations situations, and so we would like to have a way of talking to each other much more. We have an example of this here in the Chilliwack River Valley. We started to build a trail up through the valley there and soon after, these ATVers and dirt bikers were right on our trail, turning the whole thing into mud mainly mud and potholes and all that kind of thing. So we actually I have to say that I did this on my own. I assembled the vehicle, people into a coffee shop and said we have to make up our minds here. We are incompatible and therefore we have to find a way to do this. And if we don't get together, if we don't talk to each other, of course governments and people don't want to get in the middle of these disputes and so if we talk to each other, then we're more likely to get support from governments. When I say support, I mean financial support and so on, because it serves more people. So we have done that. As an example, the Chilliwack River Valley. And what we've done is we're involved with an organization, not an organization, but with the government agency that's called Rec Sites and Trails BC. We started with an organization called LUCO and anyway we got together. We got the, in other words, this government agency, rack Sites and Trails BC, to bring us together and we're doing that to this day, and probably the only place in British Columbia where we're actually talking to each other. And what happens when that, what happened in this case is that, okay, we can share resource worlds. A lot of our resource worlds go through natural country, forests here and, of course, mining country and that kind of thing. So we agreed if we're not on a trail but on a resource road, we can share that and find ways of supporting each other.
Speaker 2:By having done that, this particular government agency decided to pay attention to the motorized people more than they did before and they organized parking lots for them, allowed them areas where they can practice their sport and that kind of thing, a little bit like the downhill cyclists as well. Their types of trails are very difficult for well motorized people don't use those trails so much and they do it for a different purpose, so they are actually kind of difficult on walkers or hikers, so they need separated areas or they tend to be compatible, especially for walkers. So there's an example of where this can happen. There can be. We need to talk to each other.
Speaker 2:So there's an organization called Outdoor Recreation Council of BC here who bring all these different recreations together. But we still haven't come to terms with the fact that, for instance, on rail trails. We think rail trails are perfect for cycling because of their grades and so on, and they appeal to all kinds of views, lots of abilities, and therefore it's perfect for cyclists in particular and of course, for walkers and in some cases with equestrians. So this is one of the reasons why rail corridors are just perfect for what we're doing.
Speaker 2:Dikes and rail corridors have good surfaces to them and you know hard surfaces. But the problem that we have there is that they bring up all the rocks and they create potholes all over and they track it. So you know, we wouldn't mind doing it with them, with ATVers and dirt bikes, but for that purpose it makes the cycling nearly impossible for most people. People who love that kind of challenge, that's one thing, but the vast majority of people who want to tour and to explore their surrounding and appreciate their environment and so on, they don't want to fight potholes and that kind of thing. And, for that matter, in some places you have to walk your bike and push it through mud and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:So it sounds like you're basically reinforcing what you said at the start, that these uses are incompatible. And so then it comes down to if we're on the side of the cyclists and the hikers and the active transportation people. You've mentioned lobbying, and it sounds as if the authorities are actually being lobbied harder or feel more pressure or support from the motorized people. They're going to put the parking lots in there and encourage them to go there. So again it comes back to this age-old thing of the cyclists and the other users have to get organized and make their voices heard.
Speaker 1:And also, I would think there would be a role for signage. I mean, if there was at least a sign that said no motorized transportation past this point, it would at least set up an expectation, if not result in direct action. But it's a step there. And I noticed that the Trans-Canada Trail Foundation does give money and grants. They gave five, almost five and a half million dollars in funding, which goes across all of Canada last year. It doesn't amount to very much in each jurisdiction, but they do give money for signage and some of these other ways that these trails can be prioritized for active transportation uses. Is that enough?
Speaker 2:The quick answer is probably no, okay, mainly. Well, there was a time when we started all of this. We started this as a grassroots organization, and as a grassroots organization, we used to meet with people locally and it was the people who were making this happen, and that's what happened in the Chilliwack River Valley. It's the local people. We got together, we talked with the motorized people together. We talked with the motorized people. By the way, the motorized people are there policing our trails there and making sure that we can work together. So it can happen, but it seems to be happening rarely.
Speaker 1:You've written a critique of the Trans-Canada Trail situation and I gather you have yet to get a response from the foundation, but one of your main points is that it's no longer a grassroots organization. What would it take Supposing you didn't have to, or want to, wait for the central office to make decisions on this? Is there a way that people in BC could rise up or get involved at a grassroots level without needing approval or being part of the formal TransCanada Foundation?
Speaker 2:Well, to start with, that's the way we started.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And until about 2017. And since that time, the organization has changed and I can see why it's difficult to run a national organization to deal with all these different groups, because all of those groups are all different in every province. You know, we govern each other, we govern differently and so on, but that was at a time when we worked as partners. So Trails BC was a partner of the Trans-Canada Trail. We still aren't in a sense. In other words, they consult with us from time to time, but at that time it was ongoing to the point where they had an employee with each Transcanda Trail that worked with us to help with the coordination with the central office, to put up the mapping and all that kind of thing, and we used to meet with each other. So there was communications between the provinces and the central office a lot more. Now, what they're doing now is that they've got leaders that look after aspects of the Trans-Catatral it might be for the First Nations aspect, others it's for signage that someone else is for some other reason and they tend to connect directly with the communities that we were connected with before, and so they try to connect directly with all these communities right across Canada, asking them to do various things and they've done that in a way where we've kind of established this whole idea of the Trans-Canada Trail.
Speaker 2:But at that time when we did it, we did it with a lot of people and we were meeting with people all the time. We had pavilions along the way where people would donate and put their names up and all those kinds of things. In other words, they were actively involved with the trail system. Now they depend an awful lot more on the community governments to do this work. Where we're working with regional districts or with the government, the provincial governments, we have a lot of public lands as well and there they're dependent on volunteers, but they're dealing directly with these government organizations rather than with organizations like ours that are true partners to make this happen. Just to give you an example of what I'm talking about this happen. Just to give you an example of what I'm talking about the city of Vancouver have you tried to follow the signage?
Speaker 1:To be honest, I've seen signs here and there, but short answer no, I've not ever felt, oh, I'm on this trail and it goes here now. It goes here now.
Speaker 2:It goes here now it goes there, it's, it's nearly impossible, and the reason why is because, uh, it's been, it's, it's being directed by someone in nova scotia do you get the idea?
Speaker 1:I got it okay.
Speaker 2:Those nova scotia people they're, they're well-meaning, they're trying very, very hard, but they're talking to a planner somewhere and saying you know they need this and they need that, but they don't do it Through the city of Vancouver. All the signage has practically disappeared like we're.
Speaker 1:We're at a bit of an impasse here, but, uh, I think we've got to wrap this up, but I I think that your example of how you've worked in it over the years is certainly one that should be held up and not forgotten and appreciated for how it can bring, as you say, the grassroots people into the, the movement, because, honestly, a trail of this complexity 29,000 kilometers across Canada I don't know how many in BC obviously cannot be managed by one or two people, or a few officers or a few leaders or something. It's got to be able to engage the community. Thanks, leon, and I appreciate your insights and guidance on getting this right and making it better and really making this TransCanada Trail all it could be. Thanks for being on the podcast.
Speaker 2:A la prochaine.
Speaker 1:Merci. You've been listening to Bike Sense, an original podcast from the BC Cycling Coalition. If you like the podcast, we'd be grateful if you could leave us a rating. On whatever platform you use, you can also subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. If you have comments or suggestions for future episodes, email me at peterladner at bccyclingca. You can help us amplify BC Cycling Coalition's voice by simply becoming a free member at bccyclingca. Thank you.