SDOT is replacing the 13-year-old Fremont Bridge bike counter

Photo from reader Holden.

The Fremont Bridge bike counter is dead. Long live the Fremont Bridge bike counter!

The old monolith counted its first bike October 12, 2012. It was a Madsen cargo bike carrying a child eating an apple. Funded in part by Cascade Bicycle Club, it was Seattle's first bike counter with a real-time display, and it attracted a lot of attention to just how many people were out there riding bikes. Seeing the number tick up as you rode by was a really cool feeling. Like, yeah, you literally count. (And yes, before you ask, it counts people on both sides of the bridge.)

Since then, the counter's data has helped take the pulse of the public's interest in riding bikes. There was tension every year about whether we would crack the one million rides mark, which would top out the annual counter climbing up the front of the black monolith. You can track major events and weather just by looking at the bike counter numbers. In 2020, weekday numbers tanked while weekend numbers skyrocketed, telling a story about the people who live in our city seeking joy amid struggle during the early months of the pandemic.

But it's been slowly falling apart. The annual tracker stopped working entirely at some point in the past year or so, and it was clear to SDOT's data team that it was time for a replacement. It counted its final bike in the early morning of June 28.

The first bike to be counted by the Fremont Bridge counter carried two people. October 12, 2012.

The old counter has already been removed, and SDOT is installing a new display to replace it. They are also installing temporary bike counters so there is minimal disruption to our data collection," an SDOT spokesperson told Seattle Bike Blog. So our tight race to 1 million rides in 2025 is still on (though a few days may need to be estimated using weekly averages). Following our record-breaking April we had our fourth-best May and our second-best June, so we're on pace for 1 million so far and could even post our second-best annual total (2019 left a very high water mark). I'll post an update once we have clean (or as clean as possible) June numbers to report.

Meanwhile, we really need to get a bike counter up and running on the Jose Rizal Bridge. Preferably, we would have one in place before the 15th Ave S bike lanes are fully open. As it stands, we don't have a good instrument for measuring SE Seattle bike trends. Though the Jose Rizal Bridge isn't the bike route pinch point that Fremont is, it's likely the best single point of measurement possible since it combines bike trips coming down Beacon Hill and traveling downtown via the Mountains to Sound Trail. The raw numbers say less than the trends, so we need baseline data as soon as possible so we can see how the new bike lanes affect those trends in the future. At the very least, SDOT could get a temporary counter in place to collect data while we try to figure out how to fund and install a real-time display.