Recently both Alexandria and Arlington have gathered some survey data on cyclists (and pedestrians) in their jurisdictions.
Alexandria's BPAC collected data on the number and gender of cyclists and pedestrians in parts of the city. With that they created a report on Non-Motorized Travel in the City of Alexandria. They performed counts at 10 locations for two hours on two separate days in July. Results include
- 26.32% of cyclists were women. And the percentage of riders who were women on the MVT was higher than at most other locations.
- They counted ~2500 cyclists over the four hours.
- The location with the highest count was at the northern most point on the MVT in Alexandria, they extrapolated that 99,060 cyclists use that location in the month of July and 825,502 for the year. Other locations in Alexandria came out as high as 60,000 for the month and as low as 4,000.
- The location with the lowest count was on the sidewalk/trail at the terminus of the Eisenhower Avenue corridor near the Van Dorn MetroRail Station
Extrapolating July counts for the whole year probably isn't reliable, since ridership likely goes down in the winter. And with 2 hours, we're dealing with a very small sample size, but this is an instructive effort nonetheless.
The report also has several recommendation such as greater connectivity to the Mt. Vernon Trail (since use is so high) and implementation of the 2008 Bicycle and Pedestrian Mobility plan.
Furthermore, Arlington recently released the results of the 2011 Arlington County Commuter Services BikeArlington study. This is primarily a nonrandom survey of people who replied to an email on the BikeArlington email list and those on bike trails - so its a survey of cyclists and people interested in cycling in Arlington. Highlights include:
- 83% of survey participants use trails at least twice a week
- Exercise came up as the main motivation for riding
- 68% bike to work at least once a week
- 51% of those who bike commute bike more than 7 miles one way
- 70% have access to showers at work and those who don't have them want them. Those who do have them were heavily influenced to bike to work because of them
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