Seattle just broke the record for April Fremont Bridge bike trips, the first new monthly high mark since COVID

Data through April 2025. See my (kinda messy) spreadsheet.

We are so back.

Seattle set an all-time record for the most bike trips across the Fremont Bridge during the month of April with 95,742, a remarkable 17% above the pre-2020 average. 2025 is also the first year since 2020 to record more than a quarter million trips across the bridge by the end of April. I speculated back in January that as more downtown employers instituted return to office mandates in 2025 Fremont Bridge bike counts might finally get back on track with their pre-pandemic numbers, but I did not expect Seattleites to start breaking records this quickly.

This means Seattle could be set up for it's biggest Bike Everywhere Day in a half decade May 14. This is a great time to offer to help your coworkers start commuting by bike. These things happen one person at a time, and there's nothing better than a helpful friend or colleague to help someone figure out how to make the switch. They start with lots of questions about how to find a good route or what kind of bike they need, and then within a few months all they want to do is ride a bike. It's beautiful.

Digging into the data so far in 2025, both January and March were also strong months, suggesting April's data is not a fluke. Stacking the months shows that hitting 1 million trips is in play for 2025, but it's probably going to be close.

2025 is the first year since 2020 to register more than a quarter million trips by the end of April.

The first couple months of 2020 continued the strong momentum from 2019, including an astounding February. Seattle was on a bike count trajectory to the moon before offices and many other workplaces closed due to the pandemic. It has taken a half decade to build back.

Bicycling did not drop during the pandemic the way it appears on the Fremont Bridge bike counter, but as a key pinch point on several major north-south bike routes, the Fremont counts are heavily affected by employment numbers in the center city. It's not just office jobs, but also all the other jobs that exist when downtown is bustling.

What's exciting is that Seattle has made some major improvements to cycling infrastructure in and around downtown since these records were set back in 2019, so there is a lot of room to grow as a wider swath of potential bike commuters are more likely to find a comfortable route to work.

April was one of the few months that 2019 did not blow all other years out of the water. I don't expect upcoming monthly counts to quite reach 2019 levels yet. But hey, with a really strong May that rolls into a strong summer, who knows?