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Alameda County Pedestrian and Bicycle Counting Project (3.7 MB PDF)
Robert Schneider, Lindsay Arnold, and David Ragland
September 2008
With an increasing number of California communities adopting pedestrian and bicycle plans, conducting walking and bicycling safety audits, and encouraging cost-effective, low-emission transportation options, there is a greater need for pedestrian and bicycle data. In response to this need, the UC Berkeley Traffic Safety Center gathered counts at 50 intersection locations throughout Alameda County to quantify pedestrian and bicycle activity and gain a more accurate understanding of pedestrian and bicycle crash risk. This pilot study demonstrates data collection and modeling methods that could be applied to CalTrans roadways statewide.
The project followed a rigorous scientific process, including selecting representative locations for sample counts; collecting data through manual and automated methods; developing adjustment factors for time of day, day of week, location, and weather; gathering fine-grained land use and transportation infrastructure data in GIS; and estimating a basic statistical model. Both pedestrians and bicyclists were counted, but the detailed analyses focus on pedestrians.
Two products of the study are summarized as posters. The first, “Extrapolating Weekly Pedestrian Intersection Crossing Volumes from 2-Hour Manual Counts (jpeg)," describes a methodology that can be used to collect pedestrian counts and derive adjustment factors for estimating weekly pedestrian volumes from short manual counts. The second poster summaries another part of the study, “A Pilot Model for Estimating Pedestrian Intersection Crossing Volumes,” which presents a simple mathematical formula for estimating the total number of pedestrians crossing an intersection during a typical week.
This research project was conducted by the UC-Berkeley Traffic Safety Center for the California Department of Transportation and Alameda County Transportation Improvement Authority.