For the first time since the pandemic, Fremont Bridge bike trips topped 1 million in 2025 and are on pace for a new record – UPDATED
People took more than one million bike and scooter trips across the Fremont Bridge in 2025, the first calendar year to top the million mark since the COVID pandemic. But perhaps even more interesting is that 2026 is off the best start ever, recording more trips in January through March than any other year including the outlier high water mark set in 2019.
UPDATE 5/1: The April total is in, and it is an April record by a mile. 103,266 trips is 8% higher than the previous April record set last year. As shown in the monthly chart below, records of such magnitude have not happened since 2019, when riders smashed a series of monthly records late in the year, an exciting trend that continued into 2020 before is was wiped out by the pandemic. The big question now is whether riders have just gotten an earlier start this year or if the counts during the bike-loving summer months will rise proportionally. Even if we had an entire year of only winter and early spring, we would still be nearly on pace for one million bike and scooter trips over the Fremont Bridge. So much for Seattle being too rainy to ride a bike.
The Fremont Bridge is a key pinch point for several cross-city bike routes, which is why it is probably the city's best location for sampling biking trends. There are few other places in the city where riders are funneled across a single counting point. However, the bridge's role as a pinch point for trips heading to the center city also makes the counts highly reliant on downtown commutes. Return to office requirements from several major employers initially led to widely-reported traffic crunches, and now we are seeing that a whole lot of workers have decided to bike instead.
In fact, as the Seattle Times reported this week, Strava released a report that put the Westlake bikeway in the top three segments in the entire US with other two being in New York City, a metro area with five times the population. Sure, Strava use is going to skew toward populations that want to use tech to track their commutes, but this result is remarkable nonetheless. The Westlake bikeway opened less than ten years ago after a protracted and sometimes ugly fight including a lawsuit by the superyacht marina Nautical Landing. But thanks to tireless organizing and consistent political leadership across multiple mayors and city council transportation chairs, the project moved forward. It could easily have been stopped if one party got a lawsuit to stick or if one politician got cold feet in the face of very wealthy opposition. Now it is by at least one measure a top-three bike route in the entire country.
The 2025 and 2026 bike counts aren't just rebuilding what we had. In 2019 when most Fremont bike count records were set, office buildings were packed with people commuting 5 days per week. Today, downtown office vacancy is still very high, hitting 34.7% by the end of 2025. Many employers have either abandoned their office space or only require a few days in-office per week. So the fact that these bike counts are nearly back to their pre-pandemic highs suggests there is something more happening than just work trips.
The number of Lime trips, for example, continue to reach levels few imagined back in 2019. Surely some Lime trips are commutes, but shared bikes are much more adept at handling little hops, side trips and transit connections rather than long repeat commutes. People making regular A to B to A commutes are much better served by owning their own bike or scooter. I would argue that Lime is showing one way that biking and scootering has become a normal part of everyday transportation in our city, enabling the spontaneity that cities are so good as providing.
Having a connected waterfront bikeway is also completely redrawing the map for bicycling around the city, providing an access point into downtown that is comfortable and inviting for big new portions of the city's population. I think the next couple months are going to show us the true power of this new connection, especially now that the Yesler Way bikeway is finally complete. When the revamped Myrtle Edwards and Centennial Parks open, scheduled to happen by June, the whole waterfront will be connected to and through the downtown core and as far south as South Park and as far west as Alki and as far North as the Fremont Bridge, the Burke-Gilman Trail and beyond. Seattle has never had this level of bike connectivity before. Last summer, my then-7-year-old biked from Wallingford/U District to a Sounders game and back. I need you all to understand how unimaginable this was even just a decade ago.
This level of connectivity is only making the need to a safe Rainier Avenue more stark. Rainier Valley neighborhoods remain cut off from their only flat and direct connection to the downtown bike network. Beacon Hill is connected, the CD and Capitol Hill are connected, Magnolia is connected, Fremont and most of North Seattle are connected, Georgetown and SoDo are connected, even much of West Seattle is connected, yet Rainier Valley residents are still forced to choose between very steep hills or very unsafe roads. Especially with Judkins Park Station now creating a major reason for folks to want to bike on Rainier Ave, the status quo is untenable.
Given the great start to 2026 counts on the Fremont Bridge, I am ready to stop looking back to 2019 and instead consider 2025 as our new baseline. It represents Seattle's new travel patterns after years of being scrambled by pandemic shutdowns and the subsequent reshaping of workforce trends. I will celebrate when we finally top 2019 because of the symbolic victory of setting a new record, but we are building back something even stronger with a higher ceiling. In fact, we have not yet reached our true bike riding tipping point, the point where it breaks fully into the mainstream and the average person considers biking as one of their everyday options. But our path to get there may be coming into view.