Highway 1 travels north to Nanaimo and reaches the Lower Mainland at Horseshoe Bay via a BC Ferries route across the Strait of Georgia.

The highway bypasses Vancouver on a freeway that travels through Burnaby, northern Surrey, and Abbotsford while following the Fraser River inland.

The freeway ends in Hope, where Highway 1 turns north and later east to follow the Fraser and Thompson rivers into the Interior and through Kamloops.

[2][3] The highway travels north on Douglas Street and forms the boundary between the residential James Bay neighbourhood to the west and Beacon Hill Park to the east.

[6] It follows Douglas Street, a six-lane urban thoroughfare with bus lanes during peak periods, and continues north into the suburban municipality of Saanich.

[7][8] Near the Uptown shopping centre, Highway 1 turns west and becomes a limited-access road that travels alongside the Galloping Goose Regional Trail through residential areas and along the north side of Portage Inlet.

The highway becomes a full freeway with four-to-six lanes as it enters the town of View Royal and travels around the north side of Mill Hill Regional Park.

[4][11] The Island Highway continues along the west side of the Saanich Inlet and enters the Cowichan Valley Regional District near Malahat.

It descends from Malahat Summit, at 352 metres (1,155 ft) above sea level, on a highway with passing lanes and a median barrier added in the late 2010s in response to a high rate of collisions.

[12] The section also has occasional closures, relying on the limited-capacity Mill Bay Ferry or the longer Pacific Marine Circle Route as alternate connections between Greater Victoria and other Vancouver Island communities.

[4] In southern Nanaimo, it has a short concurrency with Highway 19, which continues east to the Duke Point ferry terminal and northwest along the Strait of Georgia.

Highway 1 travels through central Nanaimo on Nicol Street and Stewart Avenue to the Departure Bay ferry terminal, where the Vancouver Island section ends.

[35][36] The cutoff bypassed the Yale Road which avoided the historical lake by running on its southern flank and along the base of Vedder Mountain.

[38] From 1960 to 1964, the province opened several expressway and freeway segments as a part of a continuous express route between Bridal Falls and Taylor Way in West Vancouver.

On August 1, 1960, the Chilliwack Bypass was officially opened by Highways Minister Phil Gaglardi, MLA for Chillwack William Kenneth Kiernan and a six-year-old girl who cut the blue ribbon.

Since the 2000s, 25 kilometres of road in the Kicking Horse Pass near Golden have been rebuilt in phases to modern standards, with four lanes and the removal of sharp corners.

As a result of the floods, which also damaged other highways in the Fraser Valley, road connections from Metro Vancouver to the rest of Canada were cut off.

[64] To address this, the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure has undertaken an effort to twin the highway to four-lane 100 km/h standards between Kamloops and Alberta, with a targeted completion date of 2050.

Several new projects have been funded and are expected to the constructed by 2023, including:[59] Media related to British Columbia Highway 1 at Wikimedia Commons