Did you know that you can view the City’s embedded pathway counters online? Ever wondered what these things are?
Well there are 29 counters embedded within the multi-use pathways around our city and you can view them online here.
So what does it tell us? Well filtering out cars (not sure how they would measure on the devices, but lets humor ourselves there), and take the last 30 days as an average. Remember that side by side riding and walking is probably picked up only once and there is probably a factor missed by nature of the device, but they are stated to be 97% accurate.
Peace Bridge has a peak of nearly 12,000 counts on the 5th September (Saturday) and a daily average of over 5000 counts (even on weekdays).
Coming in from the West of the city you need to add two counters, one on the Memorial pathway and one on the Bow trail pathway. Here we have a combined daily average of around 4000 counts and peaks of 7,500 counts.
The #sharedstreet area on Memorial is a little difficult, as this also had the allocated lane open and is not measured by the counter. However, the data tells us that in the month of May there were 45,000 hits and we’re still getting up to 35,000 hits in September. That’s no small number.
Coming in from the East is more difficult to measure as the routes are not all covered, but we still see well over 3000 counts per day in Inglewood by the bird sanctuary, showing that the connection of the pathways from the East is even more important (the 9th Ave crossing and New Street SE).
If you come from the North or South, well there are just not enough locations where data is collected to provide an informed view, but what there is we are still in the thousands every day. If you see your route is not covered and feel that data collection could be valuable, then contact your councilor or call the city’s 311 line to log a request.
Anyway, go have some fun on the webpage and see for yourselves how the volumes of our mobility corridors are well used and in need of progressive modernization, connecting, widening and maintaining.