A commentary by a Victoria resident.
A recent article in The Economist about active transportation rated Victoria 382nd out of 794 cities around the world for the share of its population who walk and cycle to work.
That may not seem impressive, but what caught my attention was that Victoria was the highest ranked city in Canada (and second in North America after the university town of Ithaca in New York state).
For more details I turned to the 2021 Canadian census to compare Victoria, which then had a population of 92,000, with all the other cities in Canada that had populations above 50,000.
What I found is that Victoria, with 33 per cent of the working population walking or cycling to work, is far ahead of everywhere else.
The average in Canadian cities is only 6.5 percent. More specifically, 23 per cent commute on foot and 10 per cent by bike in Victoria, and each of those shares is not only the highest of any Canadian city but about twice as high as Vancouver, the second ranked city.
If you add numbers for transit use to get a sense of car-free commuting, Victoria again ranks first in the country at 43 per cent, slightly ahead of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, even though they all have mass transit systems.
This high rate of active commuting is partly because the climate allows year-round walking and cycling, but Victoria’s high population density is also important.
It is one of six cities in Canada with densities above 4,500 people per square kilometre (Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, New Westminster and the City of North Vancouver are the others).
The average population density in Canadian cities is 1,150 people per square kilometre, which means distances between home and work (and everything else) are too great to encourage walking and cycling.
These exceptional rankings for active commuting and density made me wonder whether the city might stand out statistically in other ways.
When I looked further into the 2021 census I found that Victoria, by population the 66th largest city in Canada, nevertheless ranked first or second for about a dozen things related to housing, buildings and demography.
However, unlike its leading role for active transportation, which has to be understood positively, these other high rankings are reasons for concern.
For instance, Victoria has the lowest share of children (individuals aged 0 to 14) in its population of any Canadian city. It’s just nine per cent, well below the average of 16 per cent.
Few children mean small households. The average household size in Victoria is the lowest in Canada at 1.8 people. No other city is below 2.0; the average for Canadian cities is 2.5 people.
A major reason for the low household size is that Victoria has easily the highest proportion of people living alone of in any city in Canada.
It’s 27 per cent, which is far above the average of 12 per cent. Another way to express this is that Victoria has the highest proportion of one-person households in Canada — 49 per cent compared with a Canadian average of 29 per cent.
Actual numbers give a more striking sense of what these rates mean. In 2021 about 24,000 of Victoria’s population of 92,000 lived alone and occupied half of Victoria’s 49,000 dwellings.
By comparison, Chilliwack, with a population of 93,000, an average household size of 2.6 and 10 per cent living alone, had only 36,000 dwellings.
To house a population increase of 10,000, Victoria will have to provide about 5,600 new dwellings; Chilliwack will have to build about 3,800.
With so many people living alone and so few children, it’s not surprising that Victoria has the highest share in Canada of dwellings with only one bedroom, 40 per cent, more than three times the national average.
It also has the lowest share of dwellings with three bedrooms. This is probably because only 6,900 of the 49,000 dwellings in Victoria, or 14 per cent, are detached houses.
This is third lowest share in Canada, after Montreal and the City of North Vancouver. In most Canadian cities about half the housing consists of detached houses, but in Victoria 70 per cent of the housing is in apartments, mostly in low-rise buildings of four storeys or less.
The high proportion of housing in apartment buildings is presumably the reason why 60 per cent of the dwellings in Victoria are rented, a proportion that is second only to Montreal, and almost twice the average in Canadian cities of 34 per cent.
Victoria’s population is expected to exceed 100,000 this year and is projected to grow to 125,000 by 2040. Equivalent or greater growth in the share of active transportation will be essential to mitigate traffic congestion.
Victoria is exceptionally will positioned both for this to happen and to serve as a model for other Canadian cities.
It is, however, not clear what the consequences might be if population growth perpetuates or exaggerates Victoria’s already high proportion of people living alone in one-bedroom apartments, and its very low shares of children and detached houses.
It is difficult to see these as desirable trends.
A sensible precaution in the context of the current review of Victoria’s Official Community Plan would be to promote policies and practices that will make Victoria less of a leading case and more like an average Canadian city that has larger household sizes and a greater share of family housing.
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