The Colwood Crawl has three fixes in motion. Only one has a finish date.
Bus lanes between the McKenzie and Colwood interchanges are due in late fall 2027. Double-decker buses are arriving now. A train from Langford to Vic West is only being studied. Here is what each one changes, and where West Shore commuters actually go.
Every weekday morning, thousands of West Shore drivers head east toward Victoria and Saanich. The worst of it collects on one stretch: the Trans-Canada Highway between the Colwood and McKenzie interchanges. That is where the Colwood Crawl lives. The Province's own project page calls that section "prone to traffic congestion."
The pressure behind it is growth. Langford had 46,584 residents in the 2021 census, up 31.8 per cent in five years. The city now works from a BC Stats figure of 58,320 for 2024. Colwood had 18,961 in 2021.
Three fixes are in motion. They move at very different speeds, and only one of them has a date.
The Crawl looks like a downtown problem. The census says it is only partly one.
In May 2021, 27,980 people in Langford, Colwood, View Royal, Metchosin and the Highlands had a usual place of work. Only 5,810 of them, about one in five, worked in the City of Victoria. Almost half, 12,865, worked on the West Shore itself. Langford's biggest single destination was Langford.
The totals are our sums of Statistics Canada's figures for each municipality. Workers who went elsewhere make up the rest.
Most of them drove. Of Langford's 20,030 commuters, 15,635 drove themselves and 1,030 took transit. The average one-way trip was 21.7 minutes from Langford, 22.2 from Colwood and 31.9 from Sooke, against 20.2 across Greater Victoria. One caution: the census was taken during the pandemic, and people working from home are not counted as commuters.
The biggest project is the Highway 1 bus-on-shoulder lanes. Crews started on March 20, 2025. The Province says the work runs until late fall 2027.
When it is done, buses get a dedicated lane on each shoulder between the McKenzie and Colwood interchanges. The Province says that will give buses a continuous system of transit-only lanes from downtown Victoria to the Colwood exchange. The cost is $95 million: $67 million from the Province and $28 million from Ottawa. The job also includes a new Galloping Goose bridge for people walking and cycling at Craigflower Creek.
The Province's own estimate of the payoff is modest. It expects bus trips through that section to get up to about 20 per cent faster, saving up to five minutes. That comes on top of the roughly 20 minutes the existing bus lanes between downtown and Tillicum Road already save at peak times.
Drivers gain only indirectly, as buses move out of the general lanes. Nothing is added for cars.
Until then, the work itself slows things down. The project page warns of lane reductions, overnight lane closures between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m., and full overnight stops of up to 15 minutes for rock blasting. Closures are posted on DriveBC.
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