The busiest days to cycle

A month or so ago Auckland Transport kindly provided me with some data from their automated cycle counters that have been installed on a number of sites around the city. The data shows how many people on bikes passed each of the sites for each day up to the end of May and for some of the sites the data goes as far back as later 2010. Peter recently looked at the data from the Grafton Gully and Beach Rd cycleways and over a few posts I intend to take a look at the other ones as well as the two Peter covered from a few different angles.

All up there are 19 counters spread across the region.

• Beach Rd
• Dominion Rd
• East Coast Rd
• Grafton Bridge
• Grafton Gully
• Highbrook
• Lake Rd
• Lagoon Dr
• Karangahape Rd
• Mangere Bridge
• NW Cycleway – Kingsland
• NW Cycleway Te Atatu
• Orewa
• SH20 Dominion Rd
• Symonds St
• Tamaki Dr
• Twin Streams
• Upper Harbour

These maps from AT show where they are.

To start with, for this post I’m going to look at how the number of people cycling changes over the course of a week. For this I’ve averaged the results out by day and the data is from November 2014 to the end of April which is the peak cycling season. I’ve done it over this time period as it’s one where data is available for all counters.

As you can see by far Tuesdays are the most frequent days for cycling while Saturdays the least frequent.

The relative strength of Sundays surprised me a bit and as such I suspected it is the result of some routes having quite significant differences in use. Looking at the data confirmed this and it seems the various routes can be split into one of three rough categories, weekday commuter sites, sites with fairly even usage all week and sites that see much greater weekend recreational use. The results of these are shown below.

First up the weekday commuter routes and you can see that each generally sees a significant drop off in usage on the weekends. The highest in here is the NW cycleway at Kingsland which averages well over 700 per day on Tuesdays and in fact in the height of summer is averages close to 1,000 per day.

Next up the sites that while they may have some peaks, generally don’t see a significantly noticeable change over the course of the week. Unsurprisingly the star here is Tamaki Dr which doubles as both a strong commuter route during the week and sees a lot of recreational use on the weekends.

Here are the sites that see a clear increase in usage on weekends. The Mangere Bridge, Orewa and Upper Harbour sites are very noticeable with this – I suspect the former being families with the later more weekend warrior types.

All up some quite interesting data and results and as mentioned I’ll look at the data in some different ways it in separate posts. Is there anything you’d particularly like to see?

Lastly I understand detailed before and after monitoring is a key requirement as part of the Urban Cycleways funding so I expect that over time AT/NZTA will roll out more and more of these automated counters. I also expect that in the coming years as new routes get completed and linked together we should start to see a bit of a network effect happening.

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