July bike counts obliterated Seattle’s all-time monthly record
Data through July 2026.People took more bike and scooter trips across the Fremont Bridge in July than in any month ever in the city's history, and it wasn't even close. The 153,238 trips was near 11,000 trips more than the previous high-water mark set in August 2019, and total counts for 2026 through July are up more than 18% year-over-year.
We aren't just so back, we have left so back" far behind.
The pandemic-caused dip in bike trips, largely due to the decline in downtown commute trips, is well and truly over. Halfway through August, 2026 has already measured more bike trips than 2020, 2021 or 2022 carried in an entire year. We are a full month ahead of schedule compared to any previous year other than 2019. But as we noted in our previous analysis, Seattle is breaking all these records even as downtown office vacancy remains high and many employees are still working at least a couple days per week at home. The increase in cycling and scootering since 2019 is likely even more pronounced than these counts suggest because we are comparing them to a time when downtown offices were packed with five-day-a-week commuters.
Data through July 2026.June was also an all-time record for that month, besting June 2019 by about 6,000 trips. Every month in 2026 has measured either the most or second-most trips ever in that month (except for May, which barely placed third though only 2,000 away from the top spot). All this adds up to put the city about 60,000 trips ahead of 2019 through July. However, it could still end up being close because the wildfire smoke in recent weeks did reduce the number of trips so far in August, which is currently behind the pace set in August 2019 (though it is on an easy pace to claim second place). 2019 also set massive records in September, October, November and December, so there's a lot of biking left to do to break the 1,187,146 record for a full calendar year.
Seattle had built something amazing in the 2010s, and it was all coming together in 2019. The bridge counts show that the biking trend was still ramping up, culminating in a big February 2020 record that is still standing. Then the pandemic scrambled all the city's travel patterns. We saw weekday bike trips crater, though weekend bike trips kept growing. There was an extended period when bike shops couldn't keep bikes or parts in stock because demand was so high. So we knew that a lot of new people started biking during those down years, but they were difficult to measure given all the other chaos in the data.
At the same time, the city wisely used the lower-than-usual traffic downtown as an opportunity to make significant street changes, including connecting major pieces of the downtown bike network. This all coalesced when the new bikeway finally opened the downtown waterfront to bike travel, tying together decades worth of bicycle route investments to connect the Duwamish, Alki and Elliott Bay Trails to each other and to the downtown bike network. A much wider swath of the public now feels comfortable biking and scootering downtown. Lime also broke its all-time record in July by carrying 1.54 million trips in Seattle, besting its previous record of 1.42 million set a month earlier. I hypothesize that we are seeing the effects of these downtown changes even miles away on the Fremont Bridge like a wave traveling down the bike network. Had Seattle built a safe bike lane on Rainer Ave as the city should have, we'd be seeing the same thing there, too. There are people, especially young people, biking and scootering all over Rainier Valley despite the complete lack of a direct, flat and safe connection to the downtown bike network. The latent demand is massive, and a quality north Rainier Ave bike lane will be a guaranteed instant success.
These numbers tell a very exciting story about our city and where the people see it going. They also tell us to throw out a lot of our old assumptions about who bikes and why they bike. Return to office mandates allowed the counts to stack up again, but the fact that numbers are this high even with high office vacancy rates and many people commuting only part of the time means that people are riding bikes and scooters for all kinds of reasons in addition to commuting. Cascade was ahead of the game a decade ago when they changed their long-running Bike to Work Day" to Bike Everywhere Day." I think that with the benefit of hindsight, that's what we've been seeing in this data all along. Lots of people bike to work, but there has been a rising baseline of people who are simply biking everywhere for every reason. It's the mainstreaming of bicycles as general transportation.
Data through July 2026. Previously, I would have thought a weekend-only count was showing mostly recreation uses, but now I see it as more of a measure of general bicycle use if you remove 9-5 weekday office jobs. Compared to the chart at the top of the story, the pandemic dip has vanished or even reversed.