Having Fun With The Cambridge Bike Counter Data

Written by Boston Biker on Sep 02

I have been enjoying seeing large numbers on the Cambridge Bike Counter on my way to work every day.  But I have been thinking, what sort of fun things can we do with the data from that counter.

Here is my first go, share any fun data tricks you figure out in the comments:

Huge Numbers!:

July saw a whopping 48,851 cyclists ride past both sides of the bike counter, if we assume most of those people are riding to and from work (divide by two) we get about 24,426 “people trips” that is people who rode their bikes that month.  Wow!  June numbers were basically the same. (do note that this could be the same 1000 or so people riding every day)

Offsetting A Large Amount Of Car Traffic:

What if all 24,426 of those trips had been taken alone in a car instead?  The average car is about 13.5 feet long, that is a line of cars roughly 62.5 miles long!  That is an additional 2 miles worth of cars on the street every day.  Just think about that the next time you are stuck in traffic and you think that cyclists are “slowing you down.”

Clocking Impressive Miles:

The average bicycle trip is about an hour (source), which I think is about right for the total time of riding to and from work.  I would say the average cyclists travels about 10-12 miles per hour while in the city, meaning that people are doing around 10 miles a day, for a total of about 244,260 miles of total cycling a month! That’s more than the distance from here to the moon! (238,900 miles)

Saving A Shit Load Of Gas:

The average fuel efficiency for the US car fleet is 24.6 miles per gallon (source) if you drove said average car 244,260 miles you would be using about 9929 gallons of gas every month.

That’s A Lot Of Money:

At the time of this writing gas was about 2.30 a gallon (source) at that price 9929 gallons of gas will cost you about $22,837 saved every month.  That money most likely got plowed back into the local economy (cyclists got to eat) instead of making it way off to big oil companies far away.

Preventing A Lot Of CO2 Emissions:

Burning one gallon of gas produces about 20 lbs of CO2 (source), if cyclists are preventing 9929 gallons of gas from being burned every month that means they are preventing 198,580 lbs of CO2 from being emitted every month.  (if you take into account that cyclists themselves breath out about .8 lbs of CO2 per hour of cycling, using the assumptions above, you are still left with a very impressive 179,039.2 lbs of CO2 reduction (5,955,600- 19,540.8) )

And of course these are just cyclists going down this one (admittedly cyclists heavy) street.  There are many hundreds if not thousands of other cyclists not being captured by this counter.  I can’t wait to see more data collection like this, as it will give us a real picture of all the benefits cycling is bringing to our city.

What sort of trends can you tease out of this data? Found any trouble with my math (I don’t math all that well)?  Leave it in the comments.

Tags: cambridge bike counter, math is fun
Posted in advocacy, fun | 1 Comment »