When my husband and I lived in Victoria, we bought a house on the outskirts of town. By Victoria standards, we lived in a different city and our friends would complain about us living "so far away." We lived a mere ten minutes by car from the downtown core. While we lived in Victoria, I was able to ride my bike from our house and be at my downtown job within forty minutes.
Victoria is a walking city. Prince George is a driving city.
Victoria has a large population packed into a small area and Prince George has a small population spread out over a large area. For people born in Prince George, most of us get our drivers licenses at the age of sixteen and buy our first cars or trucks soon after that. In Victoria, many people that I knew never learned to drive. Never. It blew my mind when I found out that people like this existed. How do you not learn how to drive?
When I was in university in Prince George and after my first car blew up, I took the city bus to UNBC from the middle of the Hart Highway. The bus on the Hart at that time came once every hour and I would have to transfer at Spruceland to take the UNBC bus, which meandered around for around another forty minutes before arriving at the school. My commute, including walking to the bus stop, took at least two hours. Because I read on the bus, I would get caught up with my school papers that I should have read the night before and I didn't really mind the long commute unless the bus was late and it was cold out. When I moved to Victoria and lived downtown, the buses to the university came every ten minutes. If you missed a bus, who cares!
I haven't been on a bus since I moved back home though I hear that the Hart bus now comes every half hour which, I think, is a massive improvement to the city's transit plan. Unless I'm taking my kids to a special trip on the bus for the purpose of exposing them to being on a bus, I can't see myself riding the bus for any reason in the next little while. I love my minivan and I love being able to go to the grocery store and being able to buy more than I can carry at one time. I love being able to buy the big bag of dog food or the impractical house plant. I love being in a city where if you live more than ten minutes away, people think you live close by.
