Ohrn provides a follow-up:
Yep, it’s growing.
Photo taken January 6, 2014 at roughly 1:37 pm.
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The previous post about the counter – Grow, Baby, Grow – generated a thread with arguments, beginning with Karin, on the appropriateness of the city using taxpayer dollars to fund it.
The only discernible purpose of this counter is political, to convince voters that the policies of Vision Vancouver are good for us. As such, this is a piece of political advertising, and it should be paid for by Vision Vancouver.
Odd, I never saw it that way at all – though I now better understand the viewpoint of those who do.
My view? I definitely thought the point of putting up these counters is to convince people that cycling was good for them. Because it is.
Ohrn again: “Gretchen Reynolds writes in the New York Times about an English study into the effects on aging of an active life. While there are many ways to become active, being sedentary is all too common and easy, and is increasingly seen as not a good idea. In fact, some observers call inactivity “the new smoking”. In this study, a large number of measurements on geezers like me who ride bikes are compared to norms for sedentary geezers. The results are startling.”
… the scientists recruited 85 men and 41 women aged between 55 and 79 who bicycle regularly. The volunteers were all serious recreational riders but not competitive athlete… The scientists then ran each volunteer through a large array of physical and cognitive tests. …
The researchers compared the results of cyclists in the study against each other and also against standard benchmarks of supposedly normal aging. …
As it turned out, the cyclists did not show their age. On almost all measures, their physical functioning remained fairly stable across the decades and was much closer to that of young adults than of people their age. As a group, even the oldest cyclists had younger people’s levels of balance, reflexes, metabolic health and memory ability. …
All in all, the numbers suggest that aging is simply different in the active.
If the counter – and the infrastructure – encourages more people to cycle, then isn’t it justified as an investment in quality of life and a way to reduce health-care costs? And if that’s not something worth spending taxpayers’ dollars on, then why do we fund public health programs at all?
Karin is right.
Time to take down every freeway sign, car parking monitor, motor traffic congestion map, and every vehicle sensor. No more bean-counting of levels of service, average daily traffic, or passenger car units.
We can’t have these instruments of political advertising for Motordom being paid for by the public.
Funny, I assumed that, to a large degree, the counter is used to validate the improvement of bicycle infrastructure. No matter how strong the case is for health benefits, if it’s not see as safe, people won’t do. Build it and they will come and the health benefits will follow
Hmm, having the bicycle counter on the most well-publicized, expensive bicycle route is not going to encourage others to cycle. They’re already cycling along there. It’s nice to have it, but you have to think there’s a lot of other places and activities that could have done more with the $30k. I think that counter has more to do with making cycling advocates feel good about themselves than anything else.
Honestly $30k at the civic level doesn’t buy you much. It’s peanuts.
It could buy new gymnastics equipment for poorly-served East Van kids. Replace some gravel soccer fields with grass. You know, the unsexy but important stuff that city governments are supposed to do.
Or even, gasp, widen and smooth a bit of the cycling/walking path along the Fraser river near Elliot where it gets really dangerous.
Or even spend some money to clean the gravel and mud off the bike shoulder on SW Marine Drive
Check what things like grass playing fields and road improvements cost. You might be very surprised.
You have employed faulty logic there Gordon. How does this counter convince cycling is good for them? Perhaps if a calorie counter had been added to calculate calories burned times the number of people crossing the bridge. As it stands it is a self-congratulatory expense of tax dollars. Can we expect Vision to offer some tax money to Translink, so we can count how many people got on the 99B , and flash it on bus-side LED billboards?
Herd mentality?
Some still question the need for a bike counter. The big reason for me is that it is used to counter (pun intended) the argument that bike lanes are a big waste of public funds since no one uses these anyway. And it does not matter that counts are available online, since many believe that this is simply the city fudging the numbers and few know that these counts are available. Ken related an incident about a year ago where a TV news service hired a couple of people to do manual counts on the Hornby bike lanes, presumably to be used into an expose about how the city is fudging the numbers. Did anyone see this expose? Of course not. However, the perception still exists. No need to display motor vehicle counts since we still have default motordom. No need to count transit riders since nobody disputes TransLink counts. This counter will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that nobody rides bikes and that investing in decent cycling infrastructure is a waste of money. And even if it encourages only one person to ride a bike over the Burrard Bridge it will be money well spent. Hopefully it will encourage many more.
I guess the problem is that the number is provided in isolation.
Is 1000 per day cyclists a big number? IT’s hard to say.
If the SAME SIGN also provided the pedestrian count and the automobile count for the bridge, then that may be meaningful.
The bike counter at Science World gives the previous day’s count. This is always interesting as you can see things like day of the week and the weather that day compared to the previous day and see how that would affect people’s transportation decisions.
And actually I have heard people question Translink’s numbers and believe that they must have fudged them. This type of thing comes out of the mouths of people that will never themselves every getting on a bus so cannot imagine anyone else doing so either.
They tell us that the subsidy to every motor vehicle is estimated at $6000 per year and since this counter cost $30,000, then that works out to 5 Motor Vehicle Subsidy Units (or 5 MVSUs).
I wonder if the $30,000 included the sensors and stuff that would have been there anyway without the display unit. The amount for that shouldn’t be included in any discussion.
I believe that counting things and tabulating the results is a time-honoured technique of persuasion. Change and growth in such numbers attracts people’s attention, and can help change their thinking about that which is measured. In this case, the unspoken message is simple and very persuasive: “Lots of people are riding bikes, right here.” And the desired reaction: “Maybe I’ll try it”.
It’s worth noting that this bike counter is clearly visible to pedestrians walking the west sidewalk on the Burrard Bridge, and to motor vehicle passengers and operators waiting to turn right in the west lane.
It’s also a way to unequivocally distinguish success from failure, to paraphrase ArnoSchort (above).
In business circles, this is often expressed as “that which gets measured gets managed”. To persuade workers and bosses, for example, construction sites often display “accident-free day” counters. Even McDonald’s burger palaces did, at one time, publicly display regularly updated burger counts in order to persuade customers of their viability, and seem to have fallen back to “billions served”.
The computer industry does a brisk trade in gadgets that measure personal things like distance travelled, heart rate and so on. These gadgets are designed to make it easy to compare measurements over time, to chart improvement and optionally, to upload to web sites for public display. This helps people to start and maintain an active lifestyle, by persuading them of their improvement and progress toward goals.
Staying with computer-related things, there are vast businesses (analytics) built around measuring web site traffic and the nuances of its changes. Many sites also publicly display continuously updated traffic counters whose purpose is to persuade visitors of the size, solidity and growth of the site.
When a city turns to the task of managing transportation, one of its responsibilities is to inform and persuade its citizens of the success and viability of various modes. A public counter like this is a relatively inexpensive way to help encourage people to think about riding a bike, and reaping the immediate and personal benefits of doing so. And we all reap benefits when they do.
Many people wish to cycle but need to know it is safe and that they will not be alone. Having a counter at a very visible location will help them take the plunge. Also there is huge potential bike audience in Kits who are able to bike and will give it a go. It is well established fact that there is safety in numbers.
The City’s next task is to improve biking safety on Pacific heading west from Granville to Burrard. The City engineering department did a brilliant job straightening out the very dangerous Cornwell- Burrard intersection. It is now safer for all users.
The City of Vancouver will not be building any more roads. The cheapest way to build additional capacity to move people in and out of the City is to build and maintain bike lanes.
Maybe at best this is just a piece of relatively harmless civic boosterism (“aren’t we great!”). I’d just rather not see them proliferate, thank you.
The count was over 10,000 today.