Arthur Orsini helps students make green transportation choices.

Director of programs, Urban Thinkers

If there were an award for the most underutilized person in B.C., East Van–based school travel planner Arthur Orsini would be a shoo-in.

The man loves to ride his bike, but there are three other things people should know.

In 2000, his work with the group Better Environmentally Sound Transportation won Orsini an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development award in environmentally sustainable transportation that took him to Vienna. In 2005, he was mentioned up front in the book 500 Ways to Change the World by the Global Ideas Bank. In November 2008, he was keynote speaker at the Safe Routes to School Summit in Spokane, Washington.

“And here I can’t get work doin’ this,” Orsini lamented in an interview with the Georgia Straight at his home.

Case in point: the month of April, when he netted a total of $240.

“As a species, I had to identify that I cannot survive in this bioregion, that there was no future for a school travel planner in this region,” Orsini said. “So I either have to move or adapt. At one point, I moved to Auckland [New Zealand, from 2005 to 2007], and I could still be there. I could have had a 10-year contract doing this work. But my family said, ”˜No, we said a year,’ and they wanted to come back, and my wife had good work [at Vancouver General Hospital] and we love our neighbourhood, so we came back happily.”

Orsini said he was able to string together a few more pilot projects and contracts but was soon faced once again with the same “adapt or move away” problem. Although his life may feel like one big pilot project that is never finished, he is persistent, because he believes in what he does and loves the work.

“Pretty much everything I do centres around promoting walking and cycling—and to a lesser degree transit,” he said. “I guess it’s reducing car use. Not eliminating, but reducing car use. My primary focus is with the schools, for a few reasons. One of them is that it is a habitual journey; it’s a daily journey, and the more we can put walking and cycling into our habits, the more likely it is to be followed through.”

When working with students in Grades 4 to 12, Orsini focuses less on “infrastructure and how to change it” and more on the question of what students can do with “their own ingenuity and their own experience and their own expertise”.

Orsini said that if you talk to a group of intermediate students directly and facilitate a discussion about which cycle routes on their way to school are the safest, that very same day you have empowered and informed students.

“It’s easy to do a map, because an engineer can do a map sitting at a computer, and then maybe making some site visits to get things accurate,” he said. “Then they can photocopy them all and then distribute them and print them. And then they have a count, so they can report up to the supervisor, yes, they did the map: ”˜We handed them all out and we got artwork from all the kids for the insert,’ or whatever. But in terms of engaging families and bringing this to light, it doesn’t work.”

Orsini’s final message may sound like a pitch, but that probably stems from the fact that he has not had another two-year contract since his award-winning days with BEST.

“We need to recognize that municipalities need to have people doing this work that are on staff,” he said.

Hopefully, TransLink or the City of Vancouver can take a hint.