First Look at Traffic Counts on Union St Railroad Bridge: It's a Collector!

Automated daily counts, May 2 - August 8

Hey look! It's the first set of walking and biking counts on the Union Street Railroad Bridge from the automated counters installed earlier this year.

The data is from May 2nd to August 8th (7th?).

Bike traffic is pretty stable. In the period the average is 514, though in July it's closer to 600.

Foot traffic swings wildly, from a low of about 800 to a high of over 4,600. That's almost certainly driven by weather and special events.

Some coarse calibration has been done, but there is still some fine-tuning necessary on the counter for later this summer. So it's premature to try to say too much about it.

High Street at Pringle Creek

But right now in July and August, the average day has about 2,800 total users. For comparison, the most recent count at High Street by the Pringle Creek bridge had 3,260 car trips. That's on the small side of our mid-sized collector-rated streets, which are designated for 1,600 to 10,000 daily trips. So that's the neighborhood and scale we're in at the moment.

But that seems like an important take-away: Already, even without good connections across Wallace and Commercial, the Union Street Railroad Bridge is itself an ordinary collector-level connection in our transportation system. That's the connectivity of a real, meaningful street, not some pretend frill thing that nobody really uses.

It will be great to follow the counts here and on the Minto Bridge when that counter is installed.