Portland DOT counts bikes every year, like Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, Portland's Willamette River bridges provide ideal choke points to measure trends in bicycle traffic.
- 2007 bike counts indicate than 14,500 bicycles cross those bridges every day that 18% of the total traffic and up 21% from 2006. The Hawthorne Bridge may have the heaviest bicycle traffic in the country.
- The 2006 American Community Survey reports that 4.4% of the trips to work are by bicycle, about 4 times the rate of Philadelphia (1.2%) and 9 times the national average (0.5%).
- Bicycle traffic on the bridges has increased more that 400% since 1991.
- Reported Bicycle-Car Crashes remained steady during that same time period reinforcing the Safety in Numbers study.
- Motor vehicle counts area about the same as 1991 but vehicle miles traveled has declined.
We don't have daily counts but the 2006 rush hour counts of the Schuylkill River Bridges run at a rate of just under 400 bikes per hour, which probably adds up to 3000 to 4000 bikes per day. Portland is less than 1/3 the size of Philadelphia. The full report can be downloaded as a PDF file.
Two blogs provide oodles on info on this trend:
BikePortland.
org website, which is a great news source for bicycling in Portland.NYC's Streetsblog which includes a 30 minute video on bicycling in Portland check out the video screenshot of the Hawthorne Bridge below.
1 comments:
kudos to Portland!
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