Ask someone who bikes the KVR every morning from Uplands down toward downtown Penticton what they'd fix about the trail, and you will not hear about scenery. You'll hear about the gap where a bench should be. The stretch of shoulder with no shade at 8 a.m. in July. The spot past Vancouver Place where there's nowhere to fill a water bottle before the last climb home.
That's not a coincidence, and it's not a complaint unique to this neighborhood. It's what the City of Penticton's own trail survey found when it finally asked people who actually use this section of the Kettle Valley Rail Trail what they wanted. For years, most of the writing about the KVR has treated it as one long postcard: vineyards, tunnels, a ride toward Naramata that ends at a winery patio. The section that runs past Uplands and Redlands never fit that story, because it isn't that trail. It's the one people use to get somewhere, not the one they ride for the view. The city's new draft plan is the first time that difference has been written down instead of just lived.
Two Trails Wearing One Name
The KVR through Penticton has always been marketed as a single, continuous experience, and geographically it is. But anyone who has ridden the full length knows it behaves like two different trails stitched together. North of town, past Poplar Grove, the corridor opens into vineyards and orchards, and the ride becomes about the destination: a tasting room, a lookout, eventually the Adra Tunnel. Through Uplands and Redlands, the trail does something else entirely. It runs behind houses, crosses residential streets, and functions the way a sidewalk functions, as the thing you use on the way to work or to walk the dog before dinner.
The City of Penticton's KVR Trail Strategy, still working its way toward a final version this year, is the first planning document to actually name that split. After two rounds of public engagement in 2025, the city released a draft concept plan in June 2026 that divides the entire corridor into six distinct Character Zones instead of treating it as one continuous stretch. The stated goal was to tailor improvements to the specific context and community priorities of each section, rather than applying one generic fix to a trail that clearly isn't one generic thing. If you've ever felt like the neighborhood end of the KVR gets treated as an afterthought next to the wine country end, the city's own planning process just confirmed you were right.
What Residents Actually Asked For
The first phase of public feedback, collected through the summer of 2025, didn't produce a wish list about scenery or wayfinding art. It produced a maintenance list. According to the city's own reporting on that round of engagement, the majority of respondents said the trail needed:
- More benches
- Picnic tables
- Shaded rest stops
- Washrooms
- Water stations
- Waste and recycling bins
That's not what people ask for when they're planning a scenic ride to a winery. That's what people ask for when a trail is part of their daily infrastructure and it's missing the basics. It's the same list you'd expect from residents of any neighborhood asking the city to treat a well-used commuter path like the commuter path it already is.
By spring 2026, that feedback had shaped a real draft. Three pop-up engagement booths were set up on a Saturday in June, and their locations tell you where the city expected to find the people who actually use this stretch of trail: the Poplar Grove Trailhead, the KVR Trailhead at Vancouver Place, and the Penticton Farmers' Market downtown. One of those booths sat just off Vancouver Place, not far from the Vancouver Avenue storefront where the Bench Market has been feeding this end of the trail for two decades.
"We've heard great ideas from the community so far, and this is another important opportunity to make sure we're on the right track," said Ysabel Contreras, the city's parks capital projects supervisor, in the lead-up to that June session. "We encourage all residents to stop by one of our pop-up booths and share their feedback as we refine the plan."
That feedback window closed at the end of June 2026, which means the city is now working through what residents said and folding it into a final strategy. If you missed the booths, the door hasn't fully closed. The next public look at this will come when the finalized plan surfaces, and that's worth watching for if a bench near your regular stretch of trail is the thing you've been waiting on.
The Landmarks Already Doing the Work the Plan Hasn't Caught Up To
While the city studies what the trail needs, a few local businesses have already been functioning as its unofficial rest stops for years. The Bench Market, at 368 Vancouver Avenue, opened in 2005 and has been family owned since 2013 by chef Stewart Glynes and his wife Heather. It's the kind of place that shows up on a trail rider's route not because it's dressed up for tourists but because it's been there through every season of this neighborhood's growth, sponsoring the KISU swim club, the Penticton Vees, and the SOS Café at Penticton Regional Hospital along the way. If the KVR through Uplands ever gets the shaded rest stops residents asked for, they'll be filling a gap the Bench Market has been informally covering with a patio and good coffee for twenty years.
A short walk or ride further into the neighborhood, Flowers on the Bench Greenhouses has done something similar for the stretch closer to Munson Mountain, giving the area a landmark that has nothing to do with wine and everything to do with the actual rhythm of living here. Munson Mountain itself, listed among the city's own trail highlights for its panoramic views, sits close enough to the KVR corridor that it functions as the neighborhood's built-in break from the flat commuter grind, no city planning document required.
None of this is what shows up in the vineyard-and-tasting-room version of the KVR story. It's the version that was already true before the city's Character Zones made it official.
The Trail's Newest Users Are Nine Years Old
The clearest sign that this stretch of the KVR serves daily life rather than tourism is who's about to start using it more. The South Okanagan Youth Pickleball Association is doubling the number of elementary schools it programs in this fall, expanding into Skaha, Wiltse, Uplands, Kaleden, and West Bench elementary schools after previously running programs at Summerland, Trout Creek, KVR, Columbia, and SenPokchin. That expansion, reported in late July 2026, means Uplands Elementary students are getting an after-school activity that didn't exist there last year, on courts and school grounds that sit inside walking distance of the same trail corridor the city is redesigning.
It's a small detail next to a trail strategy, but it says something the strategy itself doesn't: this neighborhood's relationship with its stretch of the KVR isn't primarily recreational or scenic. It's woven into school pickup routines, after-school programs, and the walk to a familiar cafe. The city's draft plan, for the first time, is being built around that reality instead of around the version of the KVR that gets photographed further north.
Where This Actually Leaves You
If you live along this stretch and have been wondering why your section of the trail always feels like the practical cousin of the one everyone posts pictures of toward Naramata, the city's own planning process just validated that instinct. The fix isn't going to be a new lookout or a wine-tasting partnership. It's going to be benches, shade, and a washroom, the unglamorous infrastructure that turns a trail people already rely on into one that actually works for them.
Keep an eye on the City of Penticton's Shape Your City page for the finalized KVR Trail Strategy. And if you're weighing whether Uplands and Redlands fits the way you actually want to live day to day, not just the postcard version of the South Okanagan, Teresa Braam knows this neighborhood down to which end of the trail gets the morning shade. Let's connect.
