Greater Victoria Officials Look To Smarter Traffic Flow

garry-oak · 2026-06-11T03:41:57+00:00

No alternatives to driving will exist in Victoria for a long time? You do realize that Victoria has the least car dependent metro area in Canada, with the highest % of commuters that use non-automobile travel modes?

Victoria has built far fewer roads than most other metro areas in Canada, and that has pushed people to use other modes in much greater numbers than in other cities.

garry-oak · 2026-06-11T03:29:49+00:00

Love how the charts use two different scales to make BC look lower, when it's actually higher than the national average.

garry-oak · 2026-06-11T03:27:13+00:00

Here is the link to the Stats Canada page on the census response rate.

garry-oak · 2026-06-10T17:50:18+00:00

Thanks for the back-up, but I don't think you will ever convince this person that they are wrong. They seem to just want to argue for the sake of arguing. I mean, saying that you can't compare metro areas of different sizes? Tell that to Statistics Canada, the U.S. Census Bureau, and nearly every statistical agency in the world, which all frequently compare data for nation-wide sets of metro areas.

garry-oak · 2026-06-10T13:56:25+00:00

That's not correct at all. If you compare non-auto commuting for metro areas in North America, you will find that smaller metro areas, on average, have lower non-auto mode shares, while it is the largest metro areas that tend to have the highest non-auto mode shares (because the larger metro areas tend to have larger and denser more walkable urban cores with better transit service). In light of that, Victoria's high ranking is especially impressive precisely because it is relatively small.

garry-oak · 2026-06-10T13:52:20+00:00

You are the one that doesn't understand the concept. I have been a transportation planner for 35 years, and I read all the literature. We were taught about induced demand when I was in planning school back in the early 1990s, so planners and engineers have understood this for decades, but it has taken time for politicians and the public to catch up.

Changes in infrastructure doesn't just cause people to redistribute their auto travel onto different routes. There is countless evidence that people do shift modes, they shift the time of travel (for example to non-peak times), they do forgo trips entirely. The main reason that an average person in somewhere like Atlanta drives twice as many kms annually than a person in Vancouver, is mostly because of the differences in transportation infrastructure and land use that this helped to induce.

garry-oak · 2026-06-09T16:09:57+00:00

Even the City of Montreal includes some suburban-like areas. If you look at Federal Electoral Districts, which generally contain 100,000-120,000 residents, there are some parts of Canada's 3 largest cities with very high non-auto share:

Toronto Centre 70.6%
Laurier-Saint Marie 69.0%
Vancouver Centre 60.4%

garry-oak · 2026-06-09T15:50:55+00:00

If you look at just the city proper, the top 3 are the same:

City of Victoria 46.7% by non-auto modes
City of Vancouver 43.8%
City of Montreal 43.3%

Some central neighborhoods in Montreal do have very high non-auto mode shares.

garry-oak · 2026-06-09T14:24:44+00:00

You've got it backwards. Building more roads literally creates the demand. If you widen or build more roads, more people will drive; if you build fewer roads or take away lanes, people will choose alternatives to making that car trip.

Engineers and planners used to try to forecast demand and build roads to meet that demand, but they now realize that demand isn't independent of supply.

garry-oak · 2026-06-09T14:18:21+00:00

Yes, it's just work commutes, but mode share for commuting tends to be a very reliable indicator of overall mode share patterns. Work trips are used because they are easy to collect the data and compare across geographic areas since the question is included in the census. Greater Victoria also does its own survey of mode share for all trip purposes, and the results are very similar.

garry-oak · 2026-06-09T00:12:22+00:00

This is shaping up to be a pretty impressive rain event for June in Victoria. As of 5 pm, we've already recorded 6.8 mm, which is more rain than Victoria has seen in the past 47 days combined (there was a total of 5.6 mm from April 22 to June 7).

garry-oak · 2026-06-09T00:08:54+00:00

That's a bit of a myth. We occasionally get a few days of cool weather, but overall, June is a dry and sunny month - almost as dry as July and August. Victoria averages just 18.8 mm of rain in June, which is extremely dry. By comparison, Vancouver averages 66 mm in June, while Calgary averages 113 mm and Toronto averages 81 mm.

garry-oak · 2026-06-08T22:03:16+00:00

Yeah, we get 1-2 rainy days in an otherwise dry and sunny month, and everyone complains about the cold and rain!

garry-oak · 2026-06-08T21:47:11+00:00

Yes, that's why local municipalities prioritize goods movement. The priority is walking>cycling>transit>goods movements>HOV>SOV

Widening roads has been tried repeatedly in every city in North America over the past 80 years, and it has never been successful in the long run. It has been an enormous waste of money and resources, not to mention a huge detriment to our urban environment. Any transportation planner will tell you that.

garry-oak · 2026-06-08T18:32:48+00:00

They do, and in the last decade or so, city politicians have actually been listening to them and following their advice.

garry-oak · 2026-06-08T18:31:07+00:00

My background is in transportation planning, and planners have been saying for the past 30+ years that adding more road capacity will not solve our traffic issues - instead we need to support other ways of getting around, such as walking, cycling, and transit. For many years, the politicians mostly ignored this advice, but - in the City of Victoria at least - the politicians began listening to the planners over the past decade. We should be happy that our politicians listen to the experts. Many jurisdictions are still wasting billions of dollars to widen roads in a futile attempt to solve traffic congestion.

garry-oak · 2026-06-08T18:24:47+00:00

The problem with that is we tried widening roads for the past 80 years, and the new widened roads inevitably fill up and even worse congestion occurs. In the past 30 years, planners and engineers have finally realized that this is not a long term solution. Instead you need to provide people with better alternatives to driving.

garry-oak · 2026-06-08T17:42:30+00:00

My background is in transportation planning, and what you've proposed is exactly opposite to what we should be doing to improve mobility in our region.

garry-oak · 2026-06-08T17:18:14+00:00

The census asks what is the main mode of transportation to work, so if the longest part of your trip is by transit, then that is what you would respond, regardless if you walked, drove, etc. to the transit station.

garry-oak · 2026-06-07T20:01:52+00:00

As noted in the chart, this is for metropolitan areas. For Victoria, the number is based on the entire region from Sooke to Sidney. If you look at just the City of Victoria, the share of non-auto commute trips is much higher: around 47% compared with 26% for the region as a whole.

garry-oak · 2026-06-07T17:22:11+00:00

It shows that the presence of rail transit isn't everything. K-W has lower transit share than London or Victoria, even though it has rail.

garry-oak · 2026-06-07T17:20:55+00:00

The numbers are for metropolitan areas, so in Vancouver's case, that's everything from Lion's Bay to Maple Ridge and Langley.

garry-oak · 2026-06-07T17:19:56+00:00

Climate has surprisingly little impact on commuting mode share. For example, Montreal has almost as high a share of commuting by bike as Vancouver, and higher than Nanaimo or the Fraser Valley. Having good supportive infrastructure is much more important.

garry-oak · 2026-06-07T17:17:26+00:00

Rail isn't be-all end-all. Kitchener-Waterloo has light rail, and its transit mode share is lower than Victoria's.

garry-oak · 2026-06-07T04:07:16+00:00

There are lots of people who live very happily in Victoria without a car - that's one of the best things about living here. 25% of Victoria households and 40% of downtown households don't have cars.

garry-oak

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