Paul's 'Wheeling and Walking' blog - Active Transportation

Hi there,

Welcome back to a new year of wheeling and walking around Cochrane. As Bike Cochrane prepares for our presentation to the Town of Cochrane, the Active Transportation Committee felt that it would be useful to share some of the context around our research with our membership.

As discussed in my last post, we’ve been analyzing Strava Metro’s data of cyclists, runners, and walking users in Cochrane to get a better sense of where people are using our spaces. We’ve also been researching our town’s Capital planning documents to get a sense of where they’ll be investing taxpayers’ money in the coming years. In addition, we’ve also been digging deeper into the Cochrane Bicycling Network Plan 2012 to see where our user needs and our town’s infrastructure needs align.

This has resulted in a summary of projects or ‘top 10’ as David Letterman used to present. The Active Transportation Committee took the top 10 projects outlined within the bicycle network plan, and began to scope out the construction costs of some of the projects using some of the Town’s budgetary numbers from Capital Budgets along with numbers from construction projects we could get our hands on.  Then we took a swag at the number of people helped by a given project.  For some regional pathway connections like in Heritage, this would be pulled from the latest published Census figures from 2019 for that neighbourhood.  For some projects like on the Bow River Pathway, this benefits the whole town, and so the entire population shows up in the people helped column. 

While this isn’t a perfect metric as we don’t have a good sense of how MANY people are actually using an existing trail network, it’s a pretty good starting look at how these projects would stack up.  The larger projects like underpasses and overpasses would wind up towards the bottom, not because they’re not important, but because they’re expensive.  One project near the bottom is a proposed underpass under the new highway 22 interchange that would allow cycle and pedestrian traffic access from the largest community in Sunset to what will be our largest outdoor space once the Horse Creek Park is complete.  What’s nice about this methodology though is that it helps to put some structure around WHY a given project would get pushed towards the top of the Capital Projects Budget.  A new proposed project could be given a similar metric and see where it falls so that we can discuss why it may be more or less important than others.

While the result is a bit of an eye chart, looking at the top 4 projects here, we see a project to make the Bow River Pathway safer, one to allow the newly repaired Railway Street to operate as a safer corridor for cyclists, a new multi-use pathway along Griffin Road, and completing the paving project of Glenbow Park, something that the Town’s Parks department has proposed previously.

Now this metric is just using population data.  What if we could actually count how many people use a pathway or an area?

In my next post, I’ll review our thinking on the Bow River Pathway space and some of our community’s comments on that space. Then, I’ll touch on what Strava Metro data brings to this discussion.

As always, if you want to help, or have comments, please email me at paul@bikecochrane.com.