Visit the clearinghouse website at www.bikecounts.luskin.ucla.edu
Bike Clearinghouse Training Webinar – August 21, 2015
What is the Bicycle Data Clearinghouse Project?
This project seeks to compile, organize, make accessible, and create a data standard for bicycle count data collected in Los Angeles County. The project will collect existing data and create an interface for collecting future data, in 1 centralized location. This centralized location is a data clearinghouse (interactive mapping website) built by UCLA, where anyone can access existing data, and where municipalities can add new data that is collected. This project will also create a training manual that clearly explains how to conduct bicycle volume counts. Other elements of the project include conducting counts and surveys at Union Station, and documenting tools for estimating vehicle mile traveled and greenhouse gas emissions reductions from bicycle volume data.
Who is sponsoring this study?
The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Southern California Association of Governments are sponsoring the study. These organizations received funding for this project from a California Department of Transportation’s Community Planning grant. If you have specific questions about any of these sponsoring groups, please contact Alan Thompson (SCAG) or Lynne Goldsmith (Metro).
Why participate?
Many municipalities are interested in collecting bicycle volume data but are not aware of how to go about doing so. In response, this project will provide a training manual to do so. Secondly, the data that do exist are not in any standardized format. This makes it difficult to compare counts from different locations. Because this project is providing a data standard, planners, modelers and researchers can make fair comparisons between locations and years. In particular, travel demand modelers at SCAG need count data to validate their models. Additionally, since travel occurs independently of jurisdictional boundaries, it is important to bring data together which represent all jurisdictions. Lastly, more funding agencies, such as Metro, are going to be requiring count data collection. Metro Call for Projects will soon require before and after counts for any awarded project.
What will be done with existing count data that is collected?
Members of the project team will take existing data and convert it into the data standard. After the data is in the standard format, shapefiles will be created and these data will be posted to the mapping interface.
Additional details:
Working on this project: Madeline Brozen, Norman Wong, , Project Start Date: July 2012 Project End Date: June 2013