Travel through time on a trip from Victoria to Swartz Bay

PENTICTON – If you’re heading out on a road trip to Victoria this long weekend, you’ll want to see the latest instalment of the Ministry of Transportation's time travel video series.

Titled “Back in the Day; Time Travel from Victoria to Sidney in 1966” the video depicts a much more rurally-oriented drive on Highway 17  (Patricia Bay Highway) from Victoria to the Swartz Bay ferry terminal in 1966.

The route has seen a lot of changes in the past 53 years when the highway was mostly a two-lane rural route out of Victoria.

Work was just beginning on highway widening near the Swartz Bay terminal.

The Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure created the time travel series from “photologs,”  collections of still photos taken from the dashboard of a vehicle every 80 feet or so, which were then run together as a single film.

The photologs were created to capture road conditions information throughout the province, giving provincial highway engineers the ability to analyze a piece of highway without having to go out in the field.

Over 9,000 km of B.C. highways were chronicled by this method in the 1960s.

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