About BikePed Portal

Purpose

BikePed Portal is a national data archive for bicycle and pedestrian counts by providing collaborative opportunities and guidance on count methods, data storage, visualizations, and performance metrics for researchers, municipal planning organizations, and users interested in non-motorized traffic planning.

Background

The lack of accessible bicycle and pedestrian count data for planners, designers, and researchers provided the impetus for creating a centralized data repository and standard for collecting count data. The initial design and methodology creating BikePed Portal is well documented by Nordback et al. (2017).

Since the first product iteration of BikePed Portal, a second updated version has been under construction to address ease of access and feedback on user interface recommendations.

Summary and Objectives

BikePed Portal is intended to serve as a national repository for bicycle and pedestrian data by:

• creating a standard method for collecting bicycle and pedestrian counts,
• reducing barriers to accessible data through standard QA/QC procedures, providing usable data formats for analysis, and providing a central secure data warehouse.

In addition, BikePed Portal is intended to provide educational and research opportunities for academic researchers, students, planners, and other organizations by providing large data sets that might otherwise be unavailable and inaccessible.

System Configuration

BikePed Portal features a map-based website. The website allows users to:

• Quickly identify what data are available (including the type, such as bicycle or pedestrian, manual or automatic, and the count duration, such as continuous, short-duration, and manual) at various locations.
• Filter count sites by count type (automatic vs. manual), mode (bike, pedestrian, and other) and date.
• Allow for the selection and plotting data from one or more sites.
• View a predefined set of charts for each count location, and produce customized visualizations by setting custom visualization types, defining count aggregations (hour, day, week, month, year) or averages, and setting other parameters.
• Show data and/or associated visualizations for a single flow or flow-detector OR show data for more than one site (with option to compare, average or aggregate counts across sites).

The BP Portal is open to the public while access to upload and download data is password protected. Users who have provided count data will have access to uploading and downloading their raw data sets.