Monitoring cycling

For people managing a cycling network, there are over sixty different metrics to help evaluate the impact of engineering, education, encouragement and enforcement interventions. These range from mode share (as measured by the census question on the journey to work mode) to 'hands-up' counts in classrooms to measures of physical activity through the NZ Health Survey. The most direct measure is traffic counts – but the questions of where, when, how, and for what duration we should count requires careful consideration. This paper focuses on cycling traffic counts – primarily the trends in automatic count technology, crowd sourcing, 'big-data', and how manual surveys are still important. The Palmerston North Cycling Network Monitoring Plan is used as a case study to show how count data is managed to help identify what interventions are affecting cycling.

The paper was presented at the 2WALKandCYCLE Conference in Palmerston North. The paper is also available on our website as is the presentation.