Throughout our project, Melissa and I remained connected to not only our community, but also the City of Santa Cruz. Our first experience was working with our mentor Tiffany Wise-West, the Climate Action Analyst of the City of Santa Cruz, to construct a grant requesting funding for two bicycle counters to be installed at specific locations in Santa Cruz. Since then, we’ve been working with the City of Santa Cruz on other projects in preparation for their Bike Plan Update of 2015.
Recently, we were asked by Cheryl Schmidt, Transportation Coordinator for the City of Santa Cruz, to help conduct bicycle and pedestrian counts to collect relevant data of the volume of pedestrians and people biking near the intersection closest to where Branciforte Creek meets the San Lorenzo River. Currently, the River Levee path does not connect at this location, but a project is underway to build a bridge across the creek and connect the levee path. Melissa and I conducted counts for one hour at the Soquel/Riverside/Dakota intersection in downtown Santa Cruz. We marked down the direction the pedestrian and people biking were coming from in order for the City of Santa Cruz to see if this projected installation would have a high volume of people using it.
The results for people walking were: Eastbound 35, Southbound 24, Westbound 32, and Northbound 18.
The results for people on bikes were: Eastbound 34, Southbound 23, Westbound 29, and Northbound 19.
We found it interesting to note that the frequency of people biking and pedestrians were similar in amounts, with the Eastbound being the highest for both, Westbound being the second highest for both, Southbound being the third highest for both, and Northbound being lowest for both. Likely the high traffic numbers heading east reflect commute patterns of people heading home in the afternoon since we did the count from 4 - 5 PM on a weekday. It wasn't clear from our count how many of the people heading north and south were connecting with the levee path on either side, but this data will be used by Cheryl Schmidt in a grant application for the completion of this project.
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