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Life in the Bike Lane: Keltie

In this series we stop people along the bike lanes in Vancouver and have chats with them about their thoughts on cycling, their bikes, and more. Have a look at the archive HERE . @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --> Name? Keltie.

-1In this series we stop people along the bike lanes in Vancouver and have chats with them about their thoughts on cycling, their bikes, and more. Have a look at the archive HERE.

Keltieweb

Name?

Keltie.

Bike Brand?

It's a Devinci, and this one is called the Manchester. Devinci has a whole bunch of touring and city bikes that are named after different cities in the world, that all have slightly different features. This one is an upgrade from my last one in that it is a little bit better for touring, and its also just great for traveling around the city.

What are your plans for the rest of the summer?

Going on a bike tour in Europe at the end of September. My husband Paul and I are going to start in Holland, then make our way South, but we're kind of unsure whether we are going to end up in Spain, France or Italy. It will be late November by the time we are done so it just means that we will be somewhere close to the Mediterranean.

Have you done anything like this before?

I've done some bike tours more locally on the Sunshine Coast and Gulf Islands for a maximum a week at a time. Paul has done 3 to 4 month trips to Australia and other places, but for me this will be the biggest one that I have done.

Would you bring your own bike?

Yes. My husband is actually “The Bike Doctor” (of the shop “The Bike Doctor” on Broadway where I met Keltie in front of), so he got me this sweet new touring bike. Earlier this summer we did a little test of the bike, where we went to the San Juan Islands which are basically the American Gulf Islands and we rode around there for a week which was super fun. We went up some massive hills which was a good test of both me and the bike.

That's always a good test.

Yes, and this new bike has great gears so it works well on hilly areas even if you are carrying a bunch of gear with you. You just drop it into what my friend calls the “awesome gear” and just go on up the hills.

And what gear is that?

When you put it on the littlest one. Some people call it the “granny gear” but really it should be the awesome gear as it is what you need when you are going up a big hill.

Do you normally use your panniers when biking?

The one I am using today is a bigger pannier then I use on a daily basis. I usually have quite a bit more stylish one – I call it my “business bag” which is just quite a bit smaller and kinda looks like a hand satchel, but I had to do quite a bit of shopping at MEC so I brought out the big guns for it. This is the kind of pannier that I will be taking on my biking tour.

So I am guessing that the Bike Doctor is your favorite bike store in Vancouver?

Yes... I might be a bit biased but I think that they do a really great job especially for people who are interested in just riding around the city and not specifically super fast road biking or mountain biking. They go out of their way to break that stigma of intimidating bike shops and are quite friendly in helping people find a bike that is going to make them feel really comfortable in whatever their needs are.

So I know where your husband works. Now tell me a little bit about your day job?

I work for the city of Vancouver in the sustainability department. One of the main planning documents for the city, is the Greenest City Action Plan. There are 10 main goal areas to try to make Vancouver the greenest city in the world by 2020. My role is to work with some of the other departments around the city to move projects or programs forward that relate to the Plan. Two of the big goal areas that I am working on are the green transportation goal and the local food goal as well.

Wow. So for the local food goal do you mean community garden kind of projects?

The goal within that area is to increase the number of food assets so those can be things like community gardens, community kitchens, urban farms, that sort of thing. But the project that I am specifically working on is more looking at more local and sustainable food procurement within the city.

Is your office at City Hall then?

Yes, it's on the 7th floor of City Hall so my commute is pretty nice. I live just off of Fraser so it is just a 10 minute ride in the morning. Sometimes I change my route up depending on the season, like in the cherry blossom season I try to choose the route with the best trees on it.

Do you have the facilities at work for being a cyclist?

There is secure bike storage within City Hall, with a bike cage where you need a swipe pass to get in. And then they have showers and change rooms for people who have more of a commute to work. It is quite set up for that, and there is a whole sustainable commuting program with different incentives to try to encourage employees to take greener forms of travel to come in.

And now for kinda a left field question : Do you have any funny bike stories from when you were growing up?

When I was about 16 I had what I thought was the coolest job ever. I grew up in Calgary and I had a summer job where I was working for a cross posting of the Vancouver Police Department and the Calgary Parks and Recreation, called the Vandalism Awareness Patrol. What it consisted of was a group of us riding our bikes around the city looking for graffiti. The best part about it was that we didn't have to actually take down the graffiti, we just had to find it and report it by trying to draw out what it actually looked like in our little note books. So we just got to ride around all the time, which was at a very formative age where I would be thinking about starting driving. I spent the entire summer on my bicycle gaining that confidence riding instead. I remember one of the first days I had just got the clip in pedals, and I am sure that everybody has stories like this where you pull up to a stop sign and you forget that you are clipped in. I had that slow motion feeling as I fell over right in front of all my colleagues and boss, and my bicycle handle bars folded so we had to go and find a bicycle shop to fix them. It kind of ruined my first morning. But I luckily I wasn't hurt, just left with a bruised pride.