By nearly every account, bike ridership in San Francisco should be up — way up. Ridership has swelled across the country, and SF has made big changes to make biking easier, such as the closure of key streets to cars. Bike sales surged when the pandemic hit, and they remain high.
But our own streets and transit agency just released data, quietly, that at first glance tell us the opposite: City ridership was crushed by the pandemic and hasn’t recovered.
Anyone stumbling upon those numbers might be confused, and there’s no context to warn that, in fact, they provide an incomplete picture — something The Frisc discovered only after making inquiries to SFMTA.
And that leads to a much bigger issue. San Francisco has officially promised to reduce traffic deaths, get people out of cars, and act upon climate change goals. To do all these things — to plan for a safer, greener, more pedestrian- and bike-friendly city — San Francisco should provide a comprehensive read on how many people are biking in its streets. Right now, that’s not happening.
The data are in the details
The agency’s big data problem stems from its counting method. Before the pandemic, it laid down 75 counters to tally the bikes that rolled by. It was a system geared toward counting commuters riding to and from downtown. Only 23 of the counters remain, many still clustered in the downtown area, but the majority of workers have yet to return.
SFMTA does not have counters in many places where ridership has obviously increased, like the newly minted JFK Promenade.
Yet with no public notice, the agency just released updates from those automated counters, which show that ridership was cut in half from August 2019 to August 2020 before slowly ticking up. The counters clocked about 200,000 fewer rides this April than they did in April 2019 — still quite a gap.
SFMTA spokesperson Stephen Chun acknowledged the update is “a snapshot of data from select locations and does not include the full population of bicycle ridership.” Having only a third of the original number of street counters could explain the lower ridership, he said. (This discrepancy is not explained on the updated website.)
“These bike counters might not be as reflective of the way people are getting around and where they’re biking [now],” said Nesrine Majzoub, communications director for the SF Bicycle Coalition.
When The Frisc asked why the agency hasn’t expanded counters to include streets and routes that have become more popular, Chun replied that the counters are “challenging to maintain,” and that the agency has no plans to add any to JFK or the slow streets network.
Instead of new street counters, SFMTA has used different methods to tally cyclists on slow streets and in Golden Gate Park — all well and good for assessing those particular projects, but not helpful for building a big picture because the numbers aren’t integrated with bike counter data. (No surprise: JFK Promenade showed that ridership in 2021 was up 76 percent from 2019, and ridership on all slow streets combined went up 27 percent in the same period.)
JFK Drive data came from CityDash.ai, a platform that provides data on park traffic. SFMTA collected its slow streets numbers through periodic 24-hour counts. Both of these methods, according to Chun, are more effective for measuring the success of individual street projects than bike counters.
“Bike counting methodology needs to be standardized,” said Gillian Gillett, who was director of transportation for the late Mayor Ed Lee and now works at Caltrans. “If there was a counting standard, then the bike routes could be adjusted much more thoughtfully and in real time.”
Spikes in bikes
A critical mass of bike-related numbers from SF and beyond further highlight how the SFMTA’s data update is incomplete.
Matt Adams, president of huge Bay Area retailer Mike’s Bikes, said he saw a “massive spike in demand” — about a 50 percent increase — in 2020, numbers that reflect a national trend, and that sales are still “significantly above pre-pandemic levels.” Adams thinks demand and ridership would have pushed sales even higher if not for issues with supply chains.
‘Where people are biking has drastically changed over the last few years.’ — Nesrine Majzoub, SF Bike Coalition
There has been a documented increase in ridership as well. Eco-Counter, a Montreal company that makes bike counters like the ones SFMTA uses, tracked an average 16 percent increase in bike ridership across the United States in 2020.
Back home, there’s anecdotal evidence of more riding. Enrollment in the Bike Coalition’s education classes jumped soon after the pandemic began, according to Majzoub, and the coalition’s bike valet workers have been parking two to three times as many bikes at events like Flower Piano in Golden Gate Park as they were before the pandemic.
Based on these figures, Majzoub said, there seem to be significantly more people biking on San Francisco streets now than in 2019. Yet the coalition was “grateful” for SFMTA’s numbers, even if incomplete. “It would be icing on the cake if we did have exact numbers, but analyzing every bike ride in SF is really difficult,” she added. ”Where people are biking has drastically changed over the last few years.”
There’s no denying that San Francisco is miles ahead of most U.S. cities when it comes to bike friendliness. For what it’s worth, SF won a silver medal in this ranking, and gets plenty of other plaudits.
But the city has ambitious goals that its leaders like to tout, and reaching those goals will require a fuller understanding of where and how often people are biking. Majzoub said her group relies on SFMTA numbers when analyzing the impact of slow streets or protected bike lanes. For example, if the Bike Coalition sees heavy bicycle use on one of the city’s high-injury streets, it can shift resources to advocate for faster safety improvements. But because of the holes in the SFMTA data, the Bike Coalition has to cobble together its own ridership estimates.
SFMTA’s Chun won’t say if or when the agency will build a more complete picture of who’s riding on SF streets, and where, but it will add another data set soon. Its Active Communities Plan is rolling out in five historically underserved neighborhoods this summer, and SFMTA will be monitoring bike ridership as part of the project.
“It’s important for us to take these numbers with a grain of salt,” noted Majzoub, “to reflect both on this data and on other data we’re getting to make a better assessment on ridership.”
Max Harrison-Caldwell is a staff writer for The Frisc covering streets, parks, and other shared spaces.
