City ‘eco-counter’ site provides valuable bike lane data
Mar 29, 2023
The City and County of Honolulu now has data available online of all the people walking, bicycling, and rolling in 25 locations across Oahu.
For example, in January and February of this year, people took almost 104,000 bike trips and the top three areas for these trips were the South King Street protected bike lane, the Keoneula Boulevard side path, and the Pupukea Trail. These are some of safest bike routes on island – illustrating how important a safe ride is to helping people bike successfully!
The sensors collecting the data are known as active transportation monitoring devices, manufactured by Eco-Counter. The devices use wire loops that are installed on the pavement, allowing bicycles passing above to be sensed. The pedestrian counts are obtained by a pyroelectric sensor, which detects people passing by based on temperature changes.
“It’s so great to see the City and County of Honolulu investing in measuring active transportation,” said Kathleen Rooney, Ulupono’s director of transportation policy and programs. “For many years, we’ve not been able to answer questions about who is walking, biking, and rolling and where — one of the fundamental questions of travel — for these modes. This program is an important step in starting to help answer that question more thoroughly and helping show how effective the past projects have been. With more e-bikes and more dedicated bike lanes, we will likely see the impacts of these decisions on this platform.”
The Eco-Counter website is important to the future of transportation on Oahu as it will give the city data about the island’s current usage of streets and bike lanes. This information will help inform future planning for additional bike lanes, bike racks and expanded sidewalks.
Traveling by bicycle is on an upwards trend on Oahu and much of the progress has occurred after several designated bike lanes were created through Honolulu’s urban core. Bikeshare Hawaii, the non-profit organization that oversees Biki, Honolulu’s leading bikeshare service, published an extensive report in 2020 that showed 1.37 million rides were taken with Biki in 2019, which was a 24% increase from the previous year.
Ulupono supports the increased bike ridership because it is one of the most sustainable modes of travel around – it is economic with limited environmental impact, and becoming more inclusive as more adaptative models become available on island. Bikes are one of the best ways to move more people more efficiently and effectively in cities – they expand the places people can reach and don’t take up much space!
With an ideal climate year-round, there’s no better place to ride a bicycle! Among the many benefits of riding a bicycle as a means of transportation are saving money, getting exercise and fresh air, a reduced carbon footprint and maybe best of all, it’s a lot of fun!