This is Tom Fucoloro with Seattle Bike Blog. Seattle will make history this week
when the one millionth bike trip of 2019 will cross the Fremont Bridge a whole month
ahead of the record set just last year. Bike routes from all over North Seattle
and the city's north end suburbs converge at this bridge. For example if
you were biking into Seattle from the north you might take this regional route
called the Interurban North bike route, which starts at Linden Avenue and goes
down to Fremont Avenue and eventually reaches the Fremont Bridge.
But all these green lines are official Seattle bike facilities. The most popular
certainly is the Burk Gilman trail running next to the Ship Canal and Lake Union
here. In late 2012 the Seattle Department of Transportation and the nonprofit
organization Cascade Bicycle Club installed an electronic counter on the
bridge with sensors under the pavement on each side to count people biking
across, and has been ticking away ever since with even a live updated display
showing the daily and annual counts as you bike across. It's a good way to sort
of take the temperature of Seattle's biking trends, and recent years have been booming.
I'm making this video in mid-October so we'll only look at data
from January through September but the daily average is way beyond even just a
few years ago.
Since 2013, the first year that we have numbers, the average number of bike trips
across the bridge has increased 26%. The monthly totals show this trend as well
perhaps the best illustration of this is the busy summer time which always sees
the highest ridership. The 2019 counts are far beyond even last year's
record-breaking counts. Note that August was not smokey this year like in 2018
but even without the smoke 2019 has far outpaced 2018. Oh and we had a lot of
snow February which you can clearly see here. 2018 was the first year since 2014 to
top 1 million rides reaching that big number around Thanksgiving.
That was incredible at the time. This year Seattle is set to reach it well
before Halloween. So whether these increases are thanks to private bike
share or some major new downtown bike lanes these numbers represent more people
biking more often. And that's worth celebrating.
Thank you for riding.