Listen: Talking about Seattle’s new biking paradigm on KUOW + More interesting bike data from around the city

I was on KUOW talking with Owen Henderson about this year's exploding bike count numbers. Give it a read/listen.

Folks who have already read my previous story on the matter probably won't encounter anything super new, but it is always fun to be able to talk about good bike news to a wider audience. Building out the city's bike network is working.

I mostly focus on the Fremont bike counter as a thermometer of sorts for the city's bike trends for a number of reasons, one big one being that its dataset is the most consistent. The city's other bike counters are either much newer or have faced significant periods of downtime that screw with the data. The Fremont Bridge is a bike route pinch point where lots of regional and local routes converge, and there is a counter display so you can see for yourself if it is indeed counting properly.

However, there are some interesting things to learn from some of the other counters, so let's look at them.

Spokane Street Swing BridgeYears with an * have significant missing data, so these charts show an undercount. See the spreadsheet here.

The city's second-most useful counter is located at the east end of the Spokane Street Swing Bridge. When it is working, it provides valuable insight into biking trends affecting West Seattle and the Duwamish Valley. For example, when the rest of the city was seeing huge declines in biking following the 2020 COVID pandemic restrictions, the upper West Seattle Bridge broke. Biking across the low bridge became a precious lifeline for folks wanting to get off the peninsula, and we could see that in the count data. 2020's total ended only 11% below the 2019 total despite the fact that so many workplaces were closed.

However, the next few years were not kind to the Spokane Street counter. Repeat copper thefts and other technical issues mean that lots of data is simply lost from the 2022, 2023 and 2024 counts, making it difficult to really understand what was happening (related copper thefts also took out the street lights in the area). I'm sure some fancy statistics could help identify and fill in the gaps (if you're the kind of person who knows how to do this, let me know!). I tried to mark the gaps that I could find in the chart, but the result is that it's hard to know what to trust in these numbers.

On top of the technical issues with the counter, the bridge itself was very unreliable and had several extended periods where the trail was out of service. There is probably some interesting data to analyze from these outages, like how bike ridership is affected following an outage. Are there people who change their habits and then never go back to cycling? However, these outages do make it harder to see the higher-level trends.

2026 changes everything. Like the Fremont Bridge, the Spokane Street Bridge counter is seeing record ridership. June, July and August all set records for their months, and July is now the all-time highest same as the Fremont Bridge. So the Fremont data is not a fluke. The Spokane Street Bridge is on pace to surpass its previous annual record set in 2019. I have argued that 2026 is setting a new baseline for cycling popularity, and the numbers recorded before this year are going to be much less relevant going forward. They are bits of history now. From what I could tell from a quick check through the dataset, the 2026 Spokane Street data looks pretty clean and consistent. I'm excited to have quality West Seattle bike trend data again, and I will gladly join the area's biking witches in a ritual to protect the hydraulics that operate the unreliable swing bridge mechanism. West Seattle commuters have been through enough!

W Thomas Street Overpass on record pace despite construction closures in the first half of the year

This one is wild. Biking across the W Thomas Street Overpass from Lower Queen Anne to Myrtle Edwards Park and the Elliott Bay Trail in 2026 has already claimed the second-most trips that counter has recorded since it started in 2021. This is amazing for a couple reasons. 1: It's only September, and the counter is on pace to take the number 1 spot in a few weeks, and 2: All or parts of the park and trail is connects to were closed for much of the year due to construction. But from the day the new park opened in early June, counts across this bridge have been on a level far beyond anything previously recorded. We don't have data from 2019, which until 2026 held most the records on the city's other counters, but it is still amazing to see how the new park has been drawing people across this bridge.

One interesting bit from the counter data is that people still took trips during construction just to look out at the sea from the end of the bridge then turn around and go back. The counts were far lower during major closures, of course, but this bridge is more than just a biking and walking connection. It's easy to sometimes miss the humanity in our transportation system when people become numbers, but here are some numbers of people biking just to have a moment to take in this place where we live.

I look forward to tracking this counter next year to see how things settle into a regular pattern, but I suspect that a lot of people will be using this bridge and the newly-unified waterfront bikeways from now on. Why wouldn't you? It's beautiful.

As a side note, we really need to rename the W Thomas Street Overpass.

Jose Rizal Bridge bike counter also has past data issuesYears with an * have significant missing data, so these charts show an undercount. Data through August 2026.

I am very happy that SDOT started counting bike trips at 12th Ave S and S Lane Street, which captures biking across the Jose Rizal Bridge. There is no single bike route pinch point to capture biking trends from South Seattle, but the Jose Rizal Bridge is probably the closest thing there is. Well, that is until we build a protected bike lane on Rainer Ave S.

Unfortunately, there are significant data issues in 2023 and 2024 with huge missing gaps. The 2025 data is probably also a little wonky due to both the bridge painting project and the construction of the 15th Ave S bike lanes. So as a result, 2026 seems poised to be the top year on record, but the victory is a bit dampened since the best years for comparison are missing data. 2024 was actually slightly ahead of 2026 as of the end of May, but after that the data is largely missing. 2023 was ahead of 2026 as of the end of July, but again data issues messed up the rest of that year. I think we are going to need to take 2026 as the baseline and start comparing from here.

Perhaps the thing that stands out most in this data is how strong some of the 2022-24 months were compared to 2026. I would expect, based on trends seen in other counters, that 2022-24 would be far below current cycling rates. I don't have a great explanation. Maybe the opening of the bike lanes on MLK Way S led a lot of people to reroute to avoid climbing Beacon Hill? Previously, it was preferable to many people in many parts of Rainier Valley to climb all the way over Beacon Hill rather than deal with the awful route options to get between downtown and the Mount Baker Station area. But surely the new 15th Ave S bike lanes would more than make up for this shift, right? Or maybe those old counts inflated due to people avoiding construction in the Judkins Park Station area? I would expect the Jose Rizal Bridge numbers to be better than this, and I would love to hear any theories you all have to explain them. You can find the data in this spreadsheet.

I-90 Trail still recovering from 520 Bridge opening

The bike and walk counter on the Seattle side of the I-90 Bridge Trail is just about back to where it was in 2019, but is still below the numbers it saw before the opening of the new 520 Bridge Trail. The I-90 Trail is about 28% below the numbers it saw in 2014 when it was the only biking and walking connection across Lake Washington. Of course, this actually represents a huge increase in cycling across the lake since the 520 Bridge carries nearly double the bike trips as the I-90 Bridge.

You can play explore the count data in the Eco Counter dashboards from SDOT and WSDOT. Just note that the dashboard does not tell you if there is data missing, and missing data can screw with averages and apparent trends. Also, some data overlaps while some is only found in one of them, so check both if you aren't finding something. Be sure to share your findings in the comments below.