Sometimes I like to dream up things for the city that I am fairly certain will never come to pass, but they pop into my head and Sidewalking Victoria is a convenient way to get them out into the world. One of my biggest issues I have with Victoria, or maybe Victorians rather, is a difficulty to dream big. It wasn’t always this way, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries Victorians did dream big and thought that someday their city would rival many of the world’s greats. Due to that optimism and dreaming we have the Legislature, the Empress Hotel, Beacon Hill Park, the Inner Harbour Causeway and many of the great buildings of Old Town.

Somehow over the years with the shadow of Vancouver and Seattle stretching across the Salish Sea, Victorians now see themselves as undeserving of big dreams because those are only for big cities. It is this frame of mind that makes people uncomfortable with big city buildings downtown and likewise makes it hard for us to have big city solutions to problems like homelessness, traffic or housing affordability. The underlying message always seems to be to think of a solution; just not one that is too big or too long term. We are just a small town after all. I am a fervent supporter of amalgamation due to this reason alone, we use the individual size of our municipalities to pretend that we are not a city of 400k people (which we most definitely are).

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Perhaps there is no better example of how Victoria punishes itself with services designed for a much smaller city than with our transit system. While we have had the occasional big city plan for LRT come to light, we haven’t even really implemented proper express buses on major routes (let alone BRT…) and many of our core area routes don’t have the frequency to attract the ridership they could. The one thing that does mean is that anything that we do will have a big impact.

In 1990 Seattle opened a 2.1 kilometre long transit tunnel under downtown from the Convention Center to the International District. Adjusted for inflation it would have cost about $900 million US today. The idea was that the tunnel would take a large amount of the buses off the street, hopefully improving traffic. The tunnel is actually now closing for bus traffic and becoming an entirely LRT tunnel.