This morning at the F5 Bike to Work Day Rally at Seattle City Hall, we were delighted to announce that Seattle will be getting its first electronic bike counter!

The counter is currently being constructed by Eco-Totem, and we expect it to be open for counting on the Fremont Bridge during the last week of July. Surface sensors will count bicycles traveling on both sides of the bridge, regardless of travel direction, and the display number will increase in real-time when someone rides over the bike detectors.

The counter will loom 230cm (~7.5 feet) tall, and stand on the northwest side of the Fremont Bridge, the most heavily bike-traveled bridge in Washington.

Cascade Bicycle Club Education Foundation is donating the bike counter to the City of Seattle with funding from the Mark & Susan Torrance Foundation for the project. The Mark & Susan Torrance Foundation also funded the carbon counter at the Pacific Science Center, and it’s pretty cool that they’re interested in capturing and displaying data for public viewing. We are grateful for their support of the project and interest in supporting our mission of creating a better community through bicycling.

Cascade will also cover the cost of the counter installation, and cover some initial administrative overhead and maintenance during the first year of operation.

We’ll have a mock-up on display in Ballard during the Bike to Work Day After Party from 4 – 7 and at the “Next Fifty” event at Seattle Center on Saturday. And then starting in late July, we’ll all get to ride over it and make it count!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2012 at 1:00 pm by M.J. Kelly and is filed under Around town, Bike Month. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.