By way of Michael Alexander:
Ever since the Market Street Bike Counter was installed at Market and 10th Streets in May 2013, we’ve been looking forwrad to the tally of bike rides passing one million in a single year. 2015 was that year. The bike counter hit the one million mark in early December 2015. This biking milestone is yet another undeniable testament to how much bicycling is booming in San Francisco. We must continue shaping our city to accommodate and welcome the growing number of people who bike.
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Michael: “I believe that Market Street is San Francisco’s busiest bike corridor. How interesting that a city with a huge bike culture— far more aggressive than ours– and about 200,000 more people than Vancouver, tallies almost exactly the number of riders crossing the Burrard Bridge.”
Not quite. Vancouver reached a million on the Burrard Bridge just between January and August, 2015:
And by the end of December, the number was 1.378 million. (The Science World counter for the same period read 1,388,000 – 0.7% higher.)
That raises an interesting question. What is the busiest bikeway or route in North America?
NYCDOT shows the Hudson River Greenway having the highest weekday screenline counts at 50th St. – 5,500. Times 365 days this comes out to over 2M cyclists per year. However, greater seasonal variation likely brings this down to the roughly 1.4M of the Burrard Bridge. The busiest route in North America might be Burrard, which certainly has more accurate data.
Checked City of Vancouver’s latest bike lane stats this morning. Burrard Bridge total for 2015 is 1,378,000.
But interestingly, Science World is 1,388,000, which I make to be 0.7% higher.
Definitely not Burrard. Science World is likely higher than Burrard Bridge because many people at Science World don’t ride by the counter but bypass it via the parking lot or Quebec St.
I generally see more people biking at Science World or on Adanac than on Burrard.
Do Victoria and Montreal have bike counters?
I wonder if there are counters in the road and parking lot. If so the data could be added to the Science World counter and we can get a sense of the cycle volumes in the corridor.
One challenge with counters is that they work best when there is a relatively narrow defined lane. It is difficult to have counters covering a broad expanse. You would also tend to pick up other than just bicycles. There are not counters on the road or in the parking lot near Science World, but there were likely manual counts done that compared automated measured numbers to total numbers, in a defined sample time window.
Victoria does. We just barely bounced from 500k last year from the Galloping Goose Regional Trail. Not bad for a city of our size. Here are the raw numbers: http://www.eco-public.com/public2/?id=100117730
Chicago’s Lakefront trail at Oak St. is in the > 1 million rides/year league, but there isn’t an accurate year-total count that I can find. It also hosts more pedestrians than cyclists at that particular point; the congestion is quite substantial.
It’s hard to compare those two counters. There are parallel-ish bike routes to Market just 500m away on Folsom/Howard, whereas it looks like a few km from Burrard to the next bridge with bike lanes (Cambie).
To be accurate, the Cambie bridge doesn’t have any bike lanes, but it is more bikable than the Granville Bridge. (On another note, the shared path on the east side is no longer adequate since the city has grown.)
Cambie bridge walking and cycling improvements are high on the list at the City. Looking forward to seeing them (per the 5 year plan) as the shared path is dangerous at times simply due to user volumes of both walking and cycling modes.
Burrard and Science World are not N.A.’s bicycle volume champs, but they come close. At least one other route, the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland, Oregon, had more people riding bikes across it — 1.71 M in 2014. So says the bridge’s automated counter.
This according to the Portland Bureau of Transportation (page 6):
https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/545858