As of the latest traffic counts from May of this year, westbound morning peak-hour and eastbound afternoon peak-hour bike traffic is now greater than motorized traffic. That means, traditional downtown traffic (i.e. traffic heading into downtown in the mornings and leaving downtown in the afternoons) has more bikes than cars on Clinton Street, one of our most popular bikeways.
- Morning peak hour was 140 motorized traffic, and 206 bikes (346 total)
- Afternoon peak was 122 motorized traffic, and 210 bikes (332 total)
These counts were taken at 23rd Avenue, in-between the two diverters. Counts at other points on Clinton Street show similar results, with only at 13th Av morning inbound not meeting this criteria (counts were about 44% bike traffic). At nearly every point observed, inbound morning and outbound evening peak bike traffic exceeded motorized traffic.
This is a huge deal. Having more bikes than cars on a city-designated “bicycle priority” route will further encourage more people to ride. Safety in numbers can be a huge boost to ridership, which will even further improve safety. These counts were even taken before the Biketown rollout, so expect these numbers to increase further, as Clinton Street features two Biketown stations.
Feel free to browse the data yourself; here’s a Google Spreadsheet with the data, you can clone it (file->make a copy) if you want to do your own analysis.