On a weekday afternoon, Erin Kingsley stood at Columbia and West Sixth streets with a pen and clipboard in her hands, her eyes focused on the intersection.
“I need to mark him,” she muttered as she jotted down notes.
“Two skateboarders.”
“Two walkers.”
“There’s a bicyclist, a male bicyclist.”
Kingsley was one of about 50 people who volunteered to perform the tedious work of counting the bicycles, pedestrians and other users of 18 trails and streets in Vancouver and Clark County, such as Salmon Creek Greenway Trail, Frenchman’s Bar Trail and others. The effort is part of the National Bicycle and Pedestrian Documentation Program, and the data gathered from it will be used locally to guide planning decisions and to support grant applications for infrastructure improvements, among other uses.
“This is a great indicator to help guide decisions about adding infrastructure,” said Hailey Heath, the city of Vancouver’s volunteer coordinator who helped organize the count.
The NBPDP was started in 2003 by the design firm Alta Planning + Design, in collaboration with the Institute of Traffic Engineers Pedestrian and Bicycle Council, as a way of consistently collecting data on walking and biking, according to Mike Sellinger, a planner at the company.
According to Sellinger, the NBPDP receives submissions from 500 communities that use the data to track changes in walking and biking and where to direct infrastructure resources.
Karen Llewellyn, Clark County volunteer coordinator, said that the data from the counts will be used to answer questions, such as which crosswalks could use better lighting or which trails could use a restroom. More generally, she said, the data from the counts will reveal which trails are used more than others.
“A lot of it is just to better understand the needs of a regional trail network and how people use it,” she said.
The count occurred Sept. 12 through Thursday during the evenings, continued Tuesday morning and finishes up Sunday morning. Llewellyn explained that getting an effective count means volunteers will stand at the trails and intersections and count the walkers and bicyclists. They’ll also count other users, such as skateboarders, rollerbladers, individuals in wheelchairs and horse riders.
Additionally, volunteers will record the gender of each user of the trail or intersection. Llewellyn said that this information could reveal that women don’t feel safe on certain trails.
“It helps you start questioning why the data looks the way it does,” she said.
The data will be sent to Oregon’s Metro regional government, which coordinates the count with other local jurisdictions. Michael Harpool, trail planning intern with Metro, said that this is the 10th year the count has been conducted in the area and Clark County has been participating since 2008.
The most recent data available show the Columbia River Renaissance Trail is one of the most used trails in Clark County. Metro, using data from the count, estimated that 1,200 people used it daily in 2014 and 2015. Others are less used, such as Padden Parkway Trail, which Metro estimates 200 people use daily during the same time frame.
This year, Llewellyn said, counters will also be posted at Whipple Creek Park Trail, Captain William Clark Park at Cottonwood Beach, Chelatchie Prairie Railroad Trail, Lower River Road Trail at Farwest Steel and East Fourth Plain Boulevard at Burnt Bridge Creek.
She explained that these trails are being counted this year because of increased growth nearby. Heath noted in a follow-up email that the Burnt Bridge location was included in this year’s count because the county and city are seeking to improve the corridor’s walkability and bikeability and want to establish a baseline of its use.
