Posted May 17, 2010, 1:49 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
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City planners track cyclists, pedestrians to measure trail needs
May 11th, 2010
By Trevor Hughes
Read More: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...counters_N.htm
Quote:
Rain or shine, summer or winter, Hartford, Conn., attorney Ben Bare rides his bike for the 4-mile commute to work. "It wakes me up in the morning and blows out the stress of workday on the way home," says Bare, 35. He says the ride is just as fast as driving a car. Bare is one growing number of people turning to bicycles for transportation. According to the most recent U.S. Census figures, the number of adults who bicycled to work in 2008 was 786,098, up 26% from 2006. That number continues to grow, says Wiley Norvell, spokesman for the New York City-based Transportation Alternatives advocacy group. "It has just exploded," Norvell says. Mindful of that growth, transportation planners in states and municipalities across the USA are increasingly deploying high-tech sensors along bicycle and pedestrian paths to map trail, sidewalk and bike-lane use and assess future needs.
Planners have long collected data about the number of vehicles on major roads by placing rubber-strip counters across travel lanes, but those counters are generally unable to detect passing cyclists, says David Patton, a bicycle and pedestrian planner for Arlington County, Va. Some of the new counters, which can cost $500-$8,000, are triggered by the weight of passing trail users, while others rely on heat emitted by their bodies or bounce radar off them, Patton says. He says recent advances in technology have made the counters more affordable, which means more communities are buying them to supplement labor-intensive tallies conducted by human volunteers. "You build a Walmart and we can tell you how many car trips it will generate, on which roads, and at which times of day," Norvell says. "We know next to nothing about how and where people bike and walk in this country."
Transportation Alternatives recently estimated that 201,000 people bike daily in New York City. City-conducted sample counts showed a 26% increase in bike ridership from 2008 to 2009, Norvell says. He says other large cities are seeing — and counting — similar increases. The increased use of high-tech sensors supplements a push for expanded counts by the National Bicycle and Pedestrian Documentation Project, which this September is overseeing censuses in about 150 cities, including Kansas City, San Francisco and New York City, Michael Jones says. Jones, a planner and principal with the Portland, Ore.-based Alta Planning and Design, says he founded the count in 2004 after growing frustrated by the lack of consistently collected pedestrian and bicycle use data. He says about 10 groups conducted counts that first year.
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