New technology is helping Arlington County keep track of the millions of times that bicyclists and pedestrians use local trails and bridges throughout the year.
An updated online dashboard in partnership with the French firm Eco Counter includes a running tally of pedestrians and bicyclists that pass by 35 sites on trails countywide.
There’s a lot of counting to do, as since the start of this year, over 7.8 million pedestrian and bicyclist passages were recorded. That averages out to 1,060 counts per site per day.
The most popular sites, according to the dashboard, are a sidewalk on the west side of the Key Bridge (1.6 million counts), a sidewalk on the east side of the bridge (659,000), the Crystal City Connector (588,000) and a sidewalk on the south side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge (379,000).
“It’s a great improvement over the previous dashboard, I think,” said David Patton, a planner in the Department of Environmental Services’ Transportation Division.
He briefed members of the Bicycle Advisory Committee on the effort at their Monday meeting.
The county government had used an in-house online tool for the past decade. “We were ahead of the curve, [but the system] started to show its age,” Patton said.
Cynthia Palmer, who chairs the bicycle committee, asked the seminal question. “What are the main uses for the data?” she inquired.
The results can be used for safety studies, and also to support grant applications for pedestrian and bicycle projects, Patton said.
Data, which can be accessed by the public, also provides snapshots of where bicyclists and pedestrians are traveling, and in what numbers.
According to its website, Eco Counter has installed about 3,000 counters across North America. Patton said that while the new system represents an improvement, it was “not perfect.”
“It doesn’t work well on mobile devices,” Patton said, but on the desktop version “you can do a lot.”
In the presentation, members of the advisory panel were asked to take photos of trails in use, to augment the photography already available on the site.
The extra imagery would help those using the trails.
“We want to show what it’s like where those counters are,” Patton said.
