In my experience, many Victorians don’t realize our bike culture is unique. Even far suburbs have great trail connections and (unprotected) bike lanes.

Leaving the island is expensive and there aren’t any comparable cities close by. For many people, Victoria is just what a mid-sized city looks like

The fancy new section of Gorge ends at the Saanich border, but Saanich has plans to fix the gap over the next 2 years. There's a way of detouring around the gap you can see in OpenStreetMap. OSM is the only up to date bike map in the region www.cyclosm.org#map=17/48.44...

If you want to see a ton of bikes, make sure to check out the Galloping Goose around the Selkirk Trestle during rush hour. It gets crazy busy! Also the new bike lanes on Gorge just wrapped up and they've totally transformed the area. We're even starting to build raised sidewalks at intersections!

Also our protected bike lane network is still expanding pretty quickly. There's a ton of momentum for building bike infrastructure, because cycling has become safe and time-competitive with driving in a lot of neighbourhoods. Even suburban municipalities like Esquimalt and Saanich are building PBLs.

Here’s a few charts comparing bike lane counters during our main riding season (April - September) (Source: data.eco-counter.com/ParcPublic/?...).

Much of the cycling network was built in the past 3 years and culturally, cycling is really starting to catch on!

Another important factor I haven’t seen mentioned is our downtown bike valet! I work there and every day we get plenty of cargo bikes. On non rainy days we’re averaging around 200 bikes per day, which is roughly the capacity of a small - medium sized car parkade!