BikesCount

NEWS: Next count is on Tuesday 28th October 2014, 7am till 9 am. We need more counters, so join in. Details below.

old NEWS:  BikesCount report has been posted: Sunday 6th May 2012.

In our lobbying for better conditions for people riding bikes it helps a lot to have accurate and detailed statistics on bicycle use. Official figures are available only from the census every 5 years, or the NSW household travel survey every 3 years, so NCM is keen to generate better bicycle use data. We have supported the “Super Tuesday” count organised by BicycleVictoria, and organised a count of our own. Super Tuesday is a service offered by BikeVic to councils all around Australia in which local volunteer observers record cycle traffic. Newcastle City Council took part in this for the first time in March 2011 and, for a modest fee, got bicycle counts for 28 locations for the two hour period 7am to 9am on the first Tuesday in March. This showed 2126 counts, although of course one cyclist may be counted at various locations so we do not know how many people this represents. On the day 195 people rode past the west end of Honeysuckle drive, making this the busiest cycle commuter route.   The full detail can be seen on the BikeVic website.

The SuperTuesday count captures only 2 hours on one day of the year, and although this gives good trend data it does not tell us anything about the other days of the year, so NCM resolved to do two extra counts each year, one on a Tuesday morning and one on a weekend day. We call our local effort ‘BikesCount’ and did the first one on Tuesday 11th October 2011. We had 21 volunteers counting from 7 till 9am on a cloudy morning with occasional light showers of rain. We modified the SuperTuesday method to count males and females separately. Overall we saw 1285 people on bikes, of whom 16% were female. Comparing like with like the counts were 25% lower than in March, presumably because of the rain.

The informal impression of many spotters is that about half the cyclists are sports riders and half commuters. We would like to add more sites at the next count, and it’s not a bad way to spend two hours, so if you would like to join in the next count please email bene2ATspin.net.au              You know the routine, just replace @ for AT.