Riding the City
How a City Counts Its Riders and Why the Number Misleads
Cycle counts come from a handful of fixed sensors on the routes cities already believe in, which quietly hides riders who avoid those routes entirely.
Almost every claim a city makes about cycling growth rests on counting equipment installed in a small number of places. The counting method shapes the conclusion far more than most readers assume.
Counters sit where a city already expects riders
Automatic counters are expensive to install and maintain, so they go on corridors the city considers important. That decision is made before any data exists, and it fixes what will be measured.
The result is a picture of the routes an authority already believed in. Riders who take back streets, canal paths or awkward diagonal shortcuts pass no sensor and appear nowhere in the total.
This matters most in cities with patchy networks. The counted corridor may carry a modest share of actual trips while absorbing nearly all of the attention that the numbers generate.
Manual counts capture a moment, not a pattern
Where automatic counters are absent, a city sends people to stand at a junction for a few hours on a chosen day. Those hours become the basis for an annual figure.
Weather on the counting day therefore carries enormous weight. A wet morning can suppress the observed flow by a large margin, and a mild dry one can flatter it just as much.
Repeating the count on the same calendar week each year is meant to control for this. It controls for the season without controlling for the weather, which is the variable that actually moves riders.
Trips and riders are not the same unit
A counter records wheels passing a point. It cannot tell whether that is one person making a return journey or two people making single ones.
Cities that publish rider numbers are usually converting counts using an assumed ratio. The assumption is rarely stated alongside the headline, and small changes to it move the result substantially.
Trip purpose disappears entirely. A commuter, a delivery rider and someone riding to a shop all register identically, though they need very different things from the network.
New infrastructure distorts the comparison it is meant to prove
When a protected lane opens, counts on it rise sharply. Some of that rise is new riding and some is riders shifting off parallel streets that are not being counted.
Separating the two requires counting the surrounding streets before and after, which is more work than most schemes fund. Without it, redistribution is easily reported as growth.
The honest version of the claim is narrower. A route carries more riders than it did, which is worth knowing, but it is not proof that more people started cycling.
What a better count would need to include
Coverage away from the flagship corridors is the first gap. A scatter of cheap counters on ordinary residential streets would reveal the riding that current methods systematically miss.
The second is who is riding rather than how many. The mix of ages and the presence of people carrying children says more about whether a network works than any total.
Counts are still worth doing, and a city with imperfect numbers plans better than one with none. The error lies in treating a corridor total as a measure of a whole city's cycling.
Questions readers ask
Why do people ride on the road next to a cycle path?
Usually because the path is slower, gives up priority at every side road, or does not go where they are going. Directness is a real requirement, not a preference.
Why does a new cycle route sometimes seem little used?
Often because it does not yet connect to anything at either end. Network value grows as links join up, so early sections can look disappointing until the gaps close.
