Bike counts on trails covered with snow & ice?

@peterw_diy 75622 wrote:

Cars are hopeless in these conditions until the roads are plowed and salted, but bikes with the right tires don’t need roadway grooming.

Southerners….:rolleyes:

@peterw_diy 75622 wrote:

Last year WaPo ran a story on Arlington & NPS using sensors on trails like MVT to count bike usage. Seeing the pics of how snowy many of the commuting MUPs like W&OD still are, I wonder how many counters are on snowy/icy MUP stretches, and what the data looks like.

I had the same question with the bike lane counters where the bike lanes are covered.

Are the data from the counters available publicly? Are they posted in real time on the web?

@myoglobinologist 75859 wrote:

Are the data from the counters available publicly? Are they posted in real time on the web?

It’s a work in progress between the data counter software and the county bike/ped planners and our web software folks: http://www.bikearlington.com/pages/biking-in-arlington/counter-dashboard/

It’ll never be real time, but our aim is for it to be on a 24 hour cycle of updates.

@dasgeh 75894 wrote:

But do the counters work through the snow? And for the bike lane counters, is there any noting when the bike lane has been snowed over, so sane bikers would be in the street. For example, we bike down Quincy a lot. For most of the last week, we’ve had to take the lane (much to the chagrin of some drivers) because the bike lane was unsafe. It would be good to note somewhere when there was ice on the ground, such that the bike lane counters should not be assumed to reflect the number of bikes on the street.

Yes, the counters still count in the snow. No, the counters won’t count you in a bike lane if you don’t go over the detection strip. The system currently takes precipitation into account, but not things like ice, construction debris or parked cars in the bike lane. Everyone should understand that there are shortcomings to counters when looking at specific days when there are anomalies–the numbers are better used for viewing larger trends in month by month comparisons year over year.

@dasgeh 75933 wrote:

The iced over bikelanes should effect the entire January numbers, since it’s been OVER A WEEK!

If it’s been that long, you should definitely call it in to the street clearing team to see if they can clear them! The bike lane counter I go over along Wilson and Clarendon seemed fine this week.

Nope, it’s still a work in progress on the software/planner end!

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4591[/ATTACH]

@myoglobinologist 75952 wrote:

This is awesome. I am looking forward to writing code…

Thanks Tim.

If you are curious what others have done, check out the “Arlington Bike Counts” drop down of this: http://mvjantzen.com/cabi/stats2013.html