page_title: Victoria, British Columbia
section_title: Cycling
hierarchical_section_title: Victoria, British Columbia / Transportation / Cycling
caption_attribution_description: English: British Columbia Parliament Building, Victoria, British Columbia. Pedicab in foreground.
context_page_description: Victoria is the capital city of the Canadian province of British Columbia, located on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada's Pacific coast. The city has a population of 85,792, and the Greater Victoria Area has a population of 367,770. Victoria is the 7th most densely populated city in Canada with 4,405.8 people per square kilometre.
  Victoria is the southernmost major city in Western Canada, and is about 100 km from British Columbia's largest city of Vancouver on the mainland. The city is about 100 km from Seattle by airplane, ferry, or the Victoria Clipper passenger-only ferry which operates daily, year round between Seattle and Victoria, and 40 km from Port Angeles, Washington, by ferry Coho across the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
  Named for Queen Victoria, the city is one of the oldest in the Pacific Northwest, with British settlement beginning in 1843. The city has retained a large number of its historic buildings, in particular its two most famous landmarks, Parliament Buildings and the Empress hotel. The city's Chinatown is the second oldest in North America after San Francisco's.
context_section_description: Due to Victoria's mild year round weather with mostly rainy winters, commuting by bicycle is practical year-round compared to other Canadian cities. For this reason, the Greater Victoria area had the highest rate of bicycle commuting to work of any census metropolitan area in Canada in the 2011 and 2016 census. Greater Victoria also has an expanding system designed to facilitate bicycles and electrically assisted bicycles via bike lanes on many roads as well as separated multi-use paths for bicycles and pedestrians known as the Galloping Goose Regional Trail, Lochside Regional Trail and the E&N rail trail. These multi-use trails are designed exclusively for foot traffic and cyclists and pass through many communities in the Greater Victoria area, beginning at the downtown core and extending into areas such as Langford and Central and North Saanich.
  Bike to Work Week Victoria is a bi-annual event held in communities throughout greater Victoria, British Columbia. It is organized by the Greater Victoria Bike to Work Society with a Spring bike to work week scheduled in late May every year and a Fall bike to work week scheduled in October. The purpose of the event is to encourage bicycle commuting. Bike to Work Week began in 1995 in Victoria and has expanded to include other communities in BC through their local bicycle advocacy groups all supported by the Bike to Work BC Society. In 2008, the Bike to Work BC Society was formed as a legal entity to run the event in other communities around BC. Since its inception ridership in the yearly event has steadily increased, and in 2017 over 7000 people participated in Greater Victoria. Bike to Work Week is first a marketing initiative and secondarily a cycling event that aims to attract new daily riders to commuting by bicycle. The behaviour change (public health) model, relying on research conducted by both the provincial and federal governments that identified barriers to cycling and reasons for choosing cycling, was applied as a way to accomplish the goal of recruiting employees to bicycle to work.
  Victoria is building a protected bike lane network. The first lane opened in Spring 2017 on Pandora Avenue, between Store Street and Cook Street in the downtown core. The protected lane makes for an easy cycling connection for commuters across the new (April 2018) Johnson Street bridge, to the Galloping Goose Trail and E&N rail trail. The second protected bike lane in the network opened on Fort Street May 27, 2018. The next two roads in the downtown area bike network have been approved by city council for Humboldt and Wharf streets with construction planned to start October 2018 .
caption: Because of Victoria's mild year-round weather, with mostly rainy winters, travel around Victoria by bicycle is practical year-round compared to other Canadian cities.
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