UPDATE: Cascade Bicycle Club, Queen Anne Greenways and Ballard-Fremont Greenways will host a celebration 3–5 p.m. Saturday, October 19. Details here.
Video transcript (.txt)
As we reported previously, 2019 bike trips across the Fremont Bridge are set to break one million within a week, likely this weekend or early next week.
But why read about this news when you can watch a video complete with giant graphs hovering over the city like the spaceships in Independence Day?
For real, though, this is pretty exciting. And those who did read the previous story, note that I actually cropped the peaks of some 2019 months in the month-by-month graph I posted. I have since updated it with this even more impressive (and accurate) image:
I also looked at how the average daily bike trips compare year to year, and it’s pretty incredible. Since it is only mid-October, I used only data from January through September of each year:
And here’s the year-over-year percent change by month between 2018 and 2019. This February’s major snowfall and 2018’s smokey August are the biggest outliers, but the trend is very positive across nearly the entire year so far:
All this is to say that you all are great and biking is wonderful.
Also, let me know what you think of this style of video.
Comments
12 responses to “Watch: Fremont Bridge nears 1 million 2019 bike trips 1 month early”
When did the extension to the 2nd ave bike lane open? I remember that causing a step change in the West Seattle counter, but I winner of that also invoked flows across the bridge…
April of 18 – right about the time that there was a step change for Fremont traffic, more out less. Interesting that the Westlake cycle track didn’t increase traffic when it opened in 9/16…
I assume the counter doesn’t count those of us who bicycle over the bridge deck?
Correct. The sensors are on both sidewalks.
Does the counter have enough digits to display 1,000,000, or will it reset back to zero?
I believe the annual “thermometer” just reaches the top and stays that way until Jan 1. The numbers only show the daily count.
See the video for how the counters show data.
I believe the digits display the running total for the day, and a “vertical progress bar” shows yearly riders (up to 1 million).
To put this number in context,how many car trips per day go across the Fremont bridge? If it’s 30,000, that means bikes have hit the 10% mark. With limited capacity, due to the stoplights, I don’t see how the number of daily car trips could be much more than 30k.
Found a Seattle Times article which quoted 28,800 cars per day over the fremont bridge in 2014. So you are probably in the ballpark.
yes, vehicle trips are about 30k per weekday. of those vehicles, about 500 weekday bus trips carried about 8,500 riders across the bridge.
[…] New highs: The Fremont Bridge hits a new record pace for bike crossings with an earlier one million this month. […]
[…] As we have reported, biking is booming right now. The number of trips by bike this year is obliterating the previous records, and this is in no small part due to bike improvements like the 2nd Ave protected bike lane. To replace this bike lane so that parking garages can empty out faster following events is simply wrong. It is backwards. It must be stopped. […]