Rush Hour Bicycle Census at Columbus & Cedar

1885 Ordinary, with the small wheel in front.  From Patent Pending Blog.

We performed another bicycle census at the intersection of Columbus Avenue and Cedar Street this past Thursday, 23 September 2010 between 5 and 6 pm.  The temperature was in the high 60s, the wind was calm, and the skies were clear.  We posted ourselves on the outbound side of Columbus Avenue just north of Cedar Street.

Our previous census was done on 3 June 2010 from 5:18 to 5:40 pm. We counted on our fingers while waiting for a #22 bus to show up.  We counted 103 bicyclists. This was done over a 22-1/2 minute period, yielding an hourly rate of 275 bicycles/hour.

This time, equipped with paper and pencil, we performed a more deliberate census making tallies for each five-minute interval between 5 and 6 pm.  For both the inbound and outbound directions we counted helmeted and unhelmeted bicyclists, walkers, and runners.

Surprising to us, the hourly rate was  213, a 22% drop from the 3 June count.  Put another way, in the 25 minute interval between 5:15 and 5:40—approximately the same time period of the June count—there were only 95 bicycles compared with 103 in 22-1/2 minutes.

One oughtn't generalize from only two counts, but we would have thought that with the students back in town there would have been more bicyclists, not fewer.

Here is a summary of the results for bicycles:

Bicycles	Helmeted	Unhelmeted	Total
Inbound	15	26	41
Outbound	132	40	172
Total	147	66	213

And for Pedestrians:

Pedestrians	Walkers	Runners	Total
Inbound	17	2	19
Outbound	23	3	26
Total	40	5	45

The split between helmeted and unhelmeted bicyclists was 70:30, far different to my guesstimate on 3 June of 95:5.  The split between outbound and inbound bicycle traffic was 81:19, remarkably close to my guesstimate in June.

Another observation is that the unhelmeted inbound riders—going against the homeward commute—exceeded the number of helmeted riders, while outbound the helmeted riders outnumbered the unhelmeted ones by a greater than a 3-to-1 margin.

There was one recumbent bicycle (outbound) and one bicycle rigged for freight (inbound) with an extended frame in the rear.  There were two outbound scooters not included in the count.  The were only two bicyclists traveling in Columbus Avenue proper; they were both inbound and were included in the count.

Bell Biker Bicycle Helmet.  Photo by Melissa Lew from America On the Move.