Cycle touring depends on a lot of decisions that happen in meeting rooms: whether an old rail corridor is kept in one piece, whether a washed-out trail gets repair money, whether a bus takes bikes. Those decisions often get made without anyone in the room who travels by bike. Our goal is to change that, so the benefits and interests of cycle tourism in BC are considered.
We come at this as a tourism economic development organization, and it shapes how we advocate. We do the research first, publish it openly, and offer it to the people making the decision. We are a young organization, so some of what follows is what we do today, and more of it is what we plan to do as we grow. The datasets and reports behind the work we have already done are on our Research and Data page.
Here is what we care about, in three groups: the journey itself, the corridors and trails it runs on, and growing cycle tourism well.
Getting there with a bike. A trip only works if the bike can reach the start and get home from the finish. We publish what every ferry, bus, train, and airline in BC actually does with bikes, so riders and operators are working from the same information. As we grow, we plan to work with carriers on capacity, packaging rules, and reservable bike spaces.
E-bikes. E-bike touring is the fastest-growing part of cycle tourism, and most of BC's rules were written before it existed. We make the case for charging along multi-day routes, for carriage policies on buses and ferries that fit e-bikes as they actually are, and for consistent access rules across parks and Crown land.
Safe roads between communities. Most touring routes include stretches of highway between trail sections, and a narrow shoulder can be the reason an otherwise great route does not work. We support paved shoulders and comfortable connections on the roads that link trails and communities. Those few kilometres often decide whether a whole route is rideable.
Signage and wayfinding. We would love to see a provincial standard for route markers and distance posts, so a rider can follow a route across regional boundaries without the signage changing dialect at every border.
Campgrounds that expect cyclists. A lower rate for arriving without a car, always room for someone who rode in, and no two-night minimums for a traveller who is, by definition, passing through.
Rail corridors. BC's retired rail lines are the closest thing the province has to ready-made long-distance cycling routes: gentle grades, communities every few hours, and scenery that sells itself. Some corridor sections have already been lost to decommissioning, and a few more decisions like that are being made right now. Once a corridor is broken up, reassembling it is close to impossible, so the useful moment to speak up is before the decision, not after. We make the case for holding corridors intact while their future is being worked out, and for trail conversion when the trains stop.
Trail designation. Surface quality is what makes a trail work for touring, and shared motorized use changes that surface quickly. Long stretches of BC rail trail that were once rideable on a loaded touring bike no longer are. We plan to bring the touring rider's needs into designation decisions, which rarely hear from anyone who rides a loaded bike 80 km a day.
Resource roads. Much of BC's best bikepacking runs on resource roads, and access can disappear with a locked gate or an unrepaired washout. No government agency is responsible for keeping resource roads open for recreation. The Outdoor Recreation Council of BC (ORCBC) is building a provincial inventory of the resource roads that matter for recreation through its Resource Road Access Survey, and we encourage riders and cycling organizations to put their routes on that map. Motorized recreation groups are well represented at that table. Cyclists should be too.
Climate resilience funding. Floods, fires, and washouts damage BC trails every year, and repair money is rarely part of the original build budget, so a closure can outlast the damage by years. We make the case for repair funding as a standing budget line, and we can help estimate what a closed section costs the businesses along it.
A cycle tourism infrastructure fund. New Zealand built its Great Rides network through a dedicated national fund, started as a jobs program during a recession, and those trails are now a cornerstone of rural tourism economies there. BC's own Trails Strategy called for sustained trail investment more than a decade ago. We support a dedicated provincial fund for cycle tourism infrastructure, so building and repairing routes stops depending on one-off decisions.
Measuring the cycle tourism economy. When a cycling sector measures its economic impact, investment follows. Mountain Bike BC has shown how this works: economic impact studies in six BC communities helped unlock provincial trail funding and a standing place in destination marketing. That evidence base does not exist yet for cycle touring in BC, so we are building it, starting with the Sea-to-Sky reports below. Good numbers also give Destination British Columbia what it needs to market BC as a cycle touring destination to the world.
Tourism that respects place. BC does not need more visitors everywhere. It needs the right visitors in the right places, at a pace those places choose. We try to be deliberate about how and when we direct riders toward small communities and wild places, and we hold that Indigenous communities decide how and whether visitors are invited onto their lands. Part of directing people well is preparing them, so we are building responsible travel into what we publish: Leave No Trace, AdventureSmart trip planning, wildfire awareness, and stopping the spread of invasive species.
Advocacy is slow work, and ours is just getting going. Here are a few topics where it has already started.
The former BC Rail line runs about 350 km from North Vancouver through Squamish, Whistler, and the Pemberton Valley to Lillooet and on to 100 Mile House. It is one of the most scenic rail corridors in Canada. Canadian National Railway (CN) has said it intends to end its lease on the line, which put the corridor's future into play through 2026. The province has since said it intends to keep the corridor in public hands.
The conversation about the corridor's future has been mostly about freight and passenger rail. Provincial statements do not mention cycling, and regionally, trails have surfaced as one of the things people do not yet agree on. A bikeway running alongside the tracks has been raised publicly by a planner working on corridor feasibility, but as a secondary idea, without numbers attached to it.
We think rail and trail are complementary rather than competing, and there is a fair amount of published evidence for that. Around the world, a trail beside a working railway feeds the railway passengers, and the railway extends the trail's reach. The two do better together than either does alone. Our position is that a corridor that stops carrying trains should become a trail, and one that keeps carrying trains should get a bikeway alongside it wherever the terrain allows.
Through the spring of 2026 we wrote to the elected officials, planners, local governments, and study teams working on the corridor, and offered to supply that evidence. One of the feasibility study teams took us up on it, with a specific question: how much traffic could cycle tourism actually generate for a passenger service? These two reports are our answer, prepared as input to that work in April 2026.
In July 2026 we met with MLA Jeremy Valeriote and members of his staff. He is the Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for West Vancouver–Sea to Sky, and his office convenes a regional roundtable on the corridor's future. We walked through the economics and talked about where cycling fits.
Rail and Trail as Complementary Infrastructure (PDF). Global evidence that rail and trail are mutually reinforcing rather than competing, with case studies from North America, Europe, Australasia, and East Asia.
Squamish–D'Arcy Bikeway: Cycle Tourism Economic Research (PDF). The economic case for a bikeway on the corridor: comparable-trail benchmarks, visitor spending evidence, First Nations connections, emergency access, and extension scenarios. There are companion appendices (PDF) with operational recommendations and full references.
All three reports are CC BY 4.0. Share them, quote them, build on them, including commercially, with credit to BC Cycle Tourism Society.
The Kettle Valley Rail Trail (KVR) is BC's most famous rail trail and the spine of the Trans Canada Trail through the southern Interior, running from Hope through the Okanagan toward the Kootenays. At its best it is world class: the trestles of Myra Canyon alone draw about 75,000 visitors a year. Parts of it are in trouble. The floods of November 2021 destroyed the 67 km between Brookmere and Princeton, and in February 2026 the province announced it intends to decommission that section permanently rather than repair it. In June 2026, after months of local pushback, the province partially reopened that door: it agreed to explore repairs to three segments near Princeton, while decommissioning goes ahead on the westernmost 17 km. Whether those repairs happen depends on long-term maintenance commitments and federal funding, with decisions expected around the end of 2026. Another 67 km of the connected Columbia and Western Rail Trail lost its recreation designation in 2020.
We think decommissioning is the wrong economics. The repair has been estimated at $60 million and the decommissioning at $20 million, which means spending $20 million to permanently lose a $60 million asset, along with the visitor spending it brings to communities like Princeton and Merritt. New Zealand faced a similar choice during a recession and chose to build cycle trails as a jobs program, and those trails now anchor rural economies across that country. Reporting on the Brookmere to Princeton decision has called it the first permanent break in the Trans Canada Trail anywhere in Canada.
Local governments, trail organizations, and the Trans Canada Trail are at the table working on alternatives, including locally led maintenance plans that answer the question of who looks after the trail once it is repaired. We maintain a section-by-section status assessment of the full corridor and the economic case for repair as rural economic development, and we offer both to anyone working on the corridor's future. This work is early. If you are involved and want to compare notes, we would like to hear from you.
A campground that promises to find room for someone arriving by bike, even when every site is booked, costs almost nothing and changes what is possible on a multi-day trip. In January 2026, seven cycling and outdoor recreation organizations asked Metro Vancouver Regional Parks to adopt that policy, with letters of support from four more, including Destination British Columbia and Trans Canada Trail. The letter was written by our founder, Heather Piwowar, while she was on the board of Trails BC.
The full letter, its five asks, and the places the policy already works are on our no turn-away camping page.
Several other pieces of advocacy work are underway. We write them up in Field Notes as they land, and the monthly Dispatch collects them. Subscribe here.
Working on something related, or want to compare notes? I would like to hear from you: heather@bccycletourism.ca