Atticus Dachsel Kerr likes taking the bus, so he decided to take all of them — at least in Greater Victoria.
For a whole year, the 17-year-old Esquimalt High student worked his way from route 1 (South Oak Bay/Downtown) to route 88 (Airport/Sidney).
Now he’s just wrapping up posting about each journey on his Instagram account, with mini-reviews and reflections on his bus rides.
In recent weeks, his Instagram account @busvictoriabc has jumped by several hundred followers as he gets closer to posting a video on his final ride on route 88.
He started his journey on Sept. 14, 2022, and finished about a year later. It didn’t hurt that he still had free bus-riding privileges from the City of Victoria, after moving to Esquimalt from Fairfield. “I figured, why not just take advantage of that fact to explore the city?”
While he’s not the first person with that idea — transit fans around the world have done similar journeys in their own systems — Dachsel Kerr reckons he’s the first to document the entirety of Greater Victoria’s transit system.
On Saturday, he posted a video from his early-morning ride on the Sidney-Saanichton route, No. 82, where he was the only person on the bus from start to finish.
He confesses that editing and posting the videos is his least favourite part of the process — he prefers simply riding the bus, filming and enjoying “what Victoria has to offer.”
Riding the bus has opened his eyes to the quirks and oddities of B.C. Transit service.
Many routes don’t run or run infrequently on weekends, so he had to do the majority of his rides during the summer break.
There are a few neighbourhoods that have retained their routes due to community advocacy and now have infrequent service, he said, citing routes 13 and 43 as examples.
Route 13 only runs six times a day from the University of Victoria to Ten Mile Point on weekdays, while the 43 loops through Colwood’s Belmont Park neighbourhood nine times on weekdays.
Dachsel Kerr, who has copies of old B.C. transit guides from the 1980s to the early 2000s, said it’s fascinating to see bus service expand over the years. “You can kind of see the system extend as Langford expanded, because it was really small 50 years ago.”
Some routes have been around for a long time, while busy route 15, which runs between Esquimalt and UVic, didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago, he said.
The newest addition to the system, route 49 from Langford Exchange to Skirt Mountain, was only created this year, he noted.
(Dachsel Kerr admits that he has yet to fully ride the length of the 49, which has a large section that follows the previous routing of the 56. He also hasn’t taken the two inter-region routes from Victoria to the Cowichan Valley and Shawnigan Lake yet.)
West Shore bus routes are harder to navigate, he said. “The routes are often in loops and they don’t intersect with each other very often.”
Even though he knew that route 64 from Sooke to Langford takes about two hours from end to end, Dachsel Kerr was still surprised by the breadth of communities that it serves.
“It’s this crazy long route that has all these switchbacks to service all these rural communities,” he said. “The bus driver knows everyone, because the people who take it are regulars.”
Asked about his favourite route, Dachsel Kerr said route 24 has a special place in his heart, as it passes by all the places he’s lived so far, as well as his main haunts of Tillicum Centre, Esquimalt High and downtown Victoria.
Dachsel Kerr, who will be at UVic taking a double major in music and mathematics this fall, said he’s often asked why he isn’t going into civil engineering or urban planning.
“This is just really a passion project,” he said. “It’s less about trying to fix stuff and it’s more about enjoying what I have.”
But he does have some advice for those in charge of transit policies and planning: Make free bus passes available to everyone under 18 in the capital region — something that’s currently only offered in the City of Victoria, thanks to a municipal subsidy.
“Victoria’s bus-pass program, they basically are raising a generation of people who are taking public transit regularly,” he said. “If we can make that a habit, it’s going to be great for [mode] shifting.”
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