Victoria indicatorsAll measures Business and jobs
People walking past downtown counters
1.64M counted passes in the quarter
No target expected. This is a context measure. A count from sidewalk counters, shown as activity. Targets and comparisons
Down 12% in a year.
Calculated change differs from the City’s figure
Source: City of Victoria. We read it on Nov 11, 2026.
Over time
Apr–Jun 2026 Counted passes in the quarter, by quarter
- 1,636,533 counted passes in the quarter
Targets and comparisons
Context measure: no target expected
Context measure: no target expected. A count from sidewalk counters, shown as activity.
Show the numbers as a table
| Period | Value |
|---|---|
| Apr–Jun 2026 | 1,636,533 |
| Apr–Jun 2025 | 1,824,657 |
Who decides
No government decides this directly. The bodies below decide the rules around it.
Show all 1 bodies and the laws
No government decides this directly. Visitors, shoppers and businesses decide where people go.
| Body | What it decides | Law or bylaw |
|---|---|---|
| City of Victoria Council | Regulates businesses by bylaw and manages the City’s streets. | Community Charter, s. 8 (6) Community Charter, s. 35 |
Councils: last general local election October 17, 2026; next on October 19, 2030, the third Saturday of October set by the Local Government Act, s. 52.
Each row says what a body decides and links to the law, order or bylaw that gives it that role. It does not say who caused a change: markets, households and other governments also move these numbers. Who decides what, for every measure · How we choose
What this number does not show
- Counts come from counters at fixed downtown locations; the same person can be counted more than once, and the totals are not all pedestrian activity downtown.
Two more limits
- The City of Victoria republishes these counts in its Economic Dashboard and credits them to the Downtown Victoria Business Association (the charts read “SOURCE: DVBA”). The association is not a public authority. No public body publishes its own downtown pedestrian counts, so this source is used, with this note.
- A better measure would be: Downtown storefront vacancy. Not published as data. Not asked for yet.
Not measured yet in business and jobs: empty storefronts and offices downtown, cleanliness and needle pick-up requests. See all 17 gaps
In plain words
How many times people walked past automated counters at fixed downtown locations in the quarter, compared with the same quarter a year earlier.
How we decide “Worse”
The change is 11.5% of the earlier value, at or above the 5% threshold.
A higher number means more people walked past the downtown counters. 1,636,533 counted passes in Q2 2026, compared with 1,824,657 in Q2 2025. The City reports this as down 11.5%; the two totals as printed give -10.3%. The status uses the City's published totals.
Outcome measures read Better, Worse or About the same; published government targets read Ahead of, On or Behind target; value-judgement measures read Rising, Falling or Steady in a neutral colour. A change smaller than the agency's own margin of error, or otherwise smaller than 5% of the earlier value, is About the same (or Steady). No change is calculated across a marked break in a series. The rule.
All notes on this number
Why it matters. Foot traffic is a direct sign of downtown activity for shops, restaurants and services.
- Counts come from counters at fixed downtown locations; the same person can be counted more than once, and the totals are not all pedestrian activity downtown.
- The City of Victoria republishes these counts in its Economic Dashboard and credits them to the Downtown Victoria Business Association (the charts read “SOURCE: DVBA”). The association is not a public authority. No public body publishes its own downtown pedestrian counts, so this source is used, with this note.
- The City notes that counters out of service in either year were excluded from both years to keep the comparison like-for-like.
- The percentage printed by the City (-11.5%) differs from the change between the two printed totals (-10.3%); the report does not explain the difference.
- Only one quarter and the same quarter a year earlier are read from each report.
A better measure
- What
- Downtown storefront vacancy
- Who could publish it
- City of Victoria
- Status
- Not published as data. Not asked for yet.
This page uses the best public number we found. Data requests
Which places
Area: Downtown Victoria
The City of Victoria’s Downtown neighbourhood only.
Included
- The Downtown neighbourhood as drawn on the City of Victoria’s official neighbourhood map
Not included
- Every other City neighbourhood (for example James Bay, Fairfield, North Park and Burnside)
- All other municipalities
Official definition
How the agency describes it: Downtown Victoria (counters at fixed locations).
How we got it
This number is published by the agency as shown; it is not calculated here. The script reads it from the agency’s own document and refuses to show it unless the expected text is found.
Licence and credits
This figure is public but not under an open licence: the agency publishes it for anyone to read, and it is shown here with credit and a link to the agency’s terms. About licences.
- Licence
- Public data, not under an open licence. Used with attribution. Agency’s terms of use
- Updated by agency
- Quarterly (City economic dashboard); latest release Aug 21, 2026 (date of the agency’s file)
- Retrieved
- Nov 11, 2026, 9:17 PM B.C. time
Source: City of Victoria, Victoria's Economic Dashboard, Q2 2026. Public document, used with attribution; not endorsed by the publisher.
Spot a mistake?
Email [email protected]. Fixes are listed in the corrections log.