It’s that time of the year again!
Our annual Bike Counts are critical to demonstrate the growth of our cycling community and support the Bicycle Coalition’s ongoing efforts to advocate for safer streets. With the disruption of day to day life in 2020, this year’s counts are critical for our understanding of how the pandemic has affected bicycle travel. If you want to see how the counts fared last year you can take a look at our 2019 Report.
You can help by volunteering to count – sign up for a 90 minute morning or afternoon time slot at the intersection of your choice and count cyclists as they pass. Are they wearing helmets? Riding with traffic or against it?
Want to volunteer? We’re looking for people to help out over the next several weeks.
Keep in mind, we’re doing things a little different this year. While we are keeping some of the long-standing locations on our list, we are currently in the process of adding more locations in more neighborhoods to get a better sense of who is biking, and where. We have typically looked at commuting corridors as a means to see how many people are riding their bicycle to work — in order to keep a check on the U.S. Census counts. In 2020, commuting is different. The global pandemic has changed the way many of us work and the 9-5 bike commuter isn’t the same.
Internally, we are looking at new locations for counts in neighborhoods that have typically been underrepresented in our bike counts. While we’ve worked in recent years to add new locations outside of the typical commuting corridors, this year, those locations will be about half of all bike counting locations, and we will keep up that trend for future counts, as well. While we urge you to sign up now, we will likely have our full list of count locations some time the week of August 31.