The Colwood Crawl has three fixes in motion. Only one has a finish date.
Bus lanes between McKenzie and Colwood are due in late fall 2027. Double-deckers are arriving now. A train is only being studied. And the census says most West Shore workers are not going to Victoria at all.
Ask anyone on the West Shore about the Colwood Crawl and they will tell you about the drive into Victoria. The census tells a different story. In 2021, only about one in five West Shore workers had a job in the City of Victoria. Almost half worked on the West Shore itself.
The highway still jams, for two reasons. The West Shore keeps growing, and almost everyone drives. Langford had 46,584 residents in the 2021 census, up 31.8 per cent in five years, and the city now works from a BC Stats estimate of 58,320 for 2024. Colwood had 18,961 in 2021. That same year, almost four in five Langford commuters drove to work. One in twenty took transit.
The worst of it collects on one stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway, between the Colwood and McKenzie interchanges. The Province's own project page calls that section "prone to traffic congestion." Three fixes are now in motion. Here is what each one changes, when it arrives, and what it will not do.
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 worked in the City of Victoria. Almost half, 12,865, worked in one of the five West Shore municipalities. Langford's biggest single destination was Langford.
That matters for every fix below. Bus lanes and a train toward Victoria serve the 44 per cent who work in Victoria, Saanich or Esquimalt. They do much less for a trip from Royal Bay to Westshore Town Centre.
Of Langford's 20,030 commuters, 15,635 drove 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 between the McKenzie and Colwood interchanges. Crews started on March 20, 2025. The Province says the work runs until late fall 2027.
The job widens 3.7 km of highway. Buses get 3.7 km of their own lane heading west and 3.1 km heading east, plus new RapidBus stops at the Helmcken interchange. The cost is $95 million: $67 million from the Province and $28 million from Ottawa. When it is done, the Province says, buses will have a continuous transit corridor from downtown Victoria to the Juan de Fuca bus exchange in Colwood.
A linked piece is already open. Since May 19, 2026, buses have had a shoulder lane in each direction across the Colquitz River bridges over Burnside Road in Saanich, a pinch point between Tillicum Road and the McKenzie interchange. More than 300 buses a day cross those bridges, according to the Province. That separate project cost $33.5 million.
The Province's estimate of the payoff on the main stretch 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.
The project also builds a new Galloping Goose bridge for people walking and cycling over Craigflower Creek. The Province's September 2026 update said crews were paving it.
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