How many people bike over the Hawthorne bridge every day? Now anyone walking, biking, or driving past will be able to see. Thanks to a $20,000 grant from Cycle Oregon, the city installed an electronic bike counter on the bridge yesterday.

When I stopped by yesterday afternoon, a crew was putting down the cords that will count bikes as they zip past. So it’s not functional yet, but here’s what the counter looks like (bigger photo below the cut):

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I’ve seen these counters in other countries, but this is the first in the US. The counters are made by a Canadian company called Eco-Counter and the point of them—besides being interesting to wonks—is to raise visibility of the sheer number of people who are biking. The last city bike count tallied by over 8,000 people biking across the Hawthorne during a normal day.

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Sarah Shay Mirk reported on transportation, sex and gender issues, and politics at the Mercury from 2008-2013. They have gone on to make many things, including countless comics and several books.

16 replies on “Slick Electronic Bike Counter Installed on Hawthorne Bridge”

  6. I don’t see a counter for “% that were assholes to pedestrians” on there anywhere though…not that anyone cares about non-bike riders.

  8. @Chuck, what evidence do you have that there are reliability issues with PBOT counts. This will be nice since it will give an exact count of all bikes at all times for the whole year across the bridge it is clearly not going to be affordable to install enough of these counters to come anywhere near the geographic coverage that the PBOT survey represents.

  9. No evidence, just a long-held belief vetted through years of experience that counts conducted by humans, regardless of what is being counted, are easily skewed in order to support or refute a particular goal/philosophy. I wouldn’t trust a dietitian employed by McDonalds to give me an accurate calorie count of a Big Mac anymore than I’d trust PBOT to accurately count the number of bikes crossing a bridge in the city.

  10. @Chuck I encourage you to look more fully into the methodology used for the City of Portland bicycle counts. The city already uses automated counters to make some of the high traffic area counts, and considering the number of people involved in the counting you are proposing an awfully wide ranging conspiracy. I also don’t see how you would explain away the increase in count numbers as being “skewed to support or refute a particular goal” since the methodology has remained the same year after year, meaning that each year the hundreds of people involved in counting would have to fake their numbers by a steadily increasing amount to show the observed trend. I find it a lot easier to conclude that the count is fairly accurate than to believe that such a large number of people have managed to secretly collude with one another to fake the results.

  11. Do you know where one would access that information? I’d love to look it over.

    Look, I don’t think it’s some kind of vast conspiracy or anything. It’s just when there’s an espoused goal (in this case, getting people on bikes through dedicating infrastructure to that goal) I tend to be a bit more skeptical of data.

  12. last years report can be found here and includes information about methodology: http://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportati…

    I agree with you that there is the possibility that some volunteers might inflate counts due to some misguided desire to shift the results, but there are so many people involved in the counting and the trend has continued over a long enough period that I don’t believe the results are significantly impacted by people lying about the counts and to my knowledge there has been no evidence of any falsified counts.

  13. Thanks or the link, really. Much appreciated.

    Unfortunately, the count being conducted in majority by volunteers, who have to love biking so much that they’re willing to give up their free time to count other people biking, only increases my doubt in those counts.

    And they only do counts during the summer months? You only do that if you have a specific goal in mind. That’s enough right there to write the count off, IMO.

    I’m know there’s been an increase in cycling in the past two decades. How could there not be? But having lived in this city long enough to know the way it’s run, I’m will remain very skeptical of counts from PBOT, especially while Tom Miller is in charge of the shop.

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