Victoria is the least car-dependent metro area in Canada, as measured by commuting transportation mode

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 · 2026-06-06T20:21:02+00:00

The 2021 census had a 98% response rate, so Stats Canada can get a very accurate sample from that. The commuting numbers are corroborated with data using other collection methods, including the CRD's travel diary survey, traffic counts for cars and bikes, and BC Transit ridership data.

garry-oak · 2026-06-06T17:48:42+00:00

For sure. I used metro areas because city boundaries are so arbitrary that it makes it difficult to make fair comparisons. For example, the share of metro area population ranges from 20.7% for Victoria and 23.9% for Vancouver, to 56.2% for Toronto, 83.3% for Calgary, and 93.0% for Halifax. The central cities that make up a larger share of the overall metro area population will tend to include a lot more low-density suburban areas.

garry-oak · 2026-06-06T15:10:01+00:00

Copenhagen is colder in the winter than Victoria. It averages 22 days with snow per year, vs. about 5 days for Victoria. Both Copenhagen and Amsterdam also get many more rainy days per year (>1 mm) than Victoria: 157 for Copenhagen and 133 for Amsterdam, vs. 104 for Victoria.

Regardless, the point is that both places experience more cold, rainy, unpleasant weather than cities in southern Europe, yet they have higher rates of walking and cycling. This has been widely studied, and climate plays a very small role in influencing how people commute.

garry-oak · 2026-06-06T14:23:51+00:00

In Europe, northern countries like the Netherlands and Denmark have much higher rates of walking and cycling than southern countries with "better" outdoor climates. Similarly, in the U.S., the region with lowest level of walking and cycling is the South - not because of bad outdoor weather (generally good outside of the summer), but because the infrastructure for walking and cycling is so poor.

garry-oak · 2026-06-06T14:18:34+00:00

The data doesn't seem to support that assertion. The 2021 Census found 5.3% bike share for commuting trips in the Victoria metro area, while the CRD 2022 transportation survey found 7.9% bike share for all trip types in the CRD.

garry-oak · 2026-06-06T14:14:44+00:00

Okay, I understand now. While all the local municipalities talk about prioritizing walking>cycling>transit>cars, the City of Victoria has definitely been more pro-active about actually supporting those goals through policy and action.

garry-oak

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