Since 2018, the municipal company Operátor ICT, a.s. and the Prague City Council have been jointly monitoring cycling traffic in 29 locations in Prague. Bike counters provide the city with important data that it can use to plan cycling routes and infrastructure in Prague. They then provide citizens with information about how busy each location is. The data is integrated into the Golemio data platform and is now enriched with the possibility to evaluate the intensity of cycling traffic in relation to the weather or to assess its year-on-year changes more accurately.
"Cycling in Prague has been growing in intensity in recent years. The data from the cycle counters are particularly useful for planning the future development of the city's overall cycling infrastructure and so that we can use the available data to accommodate all modes of transport in the city and gradually work on improving their quality and accessibility. In addition to the development of public transport, there are also plans to develop further segregated cycle paths and link them into continuous routes across the city. Now they are often torn into incomplete units," says Zdeněk Hřib, First Deputy Mayor of the Capital City of Prague.
"In the Golemio platform we are introducing a new dashboard with monitoring of cycling traffic intensity correlated with temperature and precipitation. It allows comparing not only the intensity of cycling traffic depending on the weather, but also between different locations, which will give users a more detailed view of cycling traffic in Prague. In addition, the data can be compared year-on-year. The analysis is prepared together with representatives of the Transport Department of the City Hall,” says Petr Suška, Director of Smart City, Innovation and Project Management at Operátor ICT.
"In order to improve the quality of the data, it is possible to publish the data across the entire monitored network in the form of an index. This is not just raw data, unadjusted for the impact of closures, technology failures or errors, etc. The index shows a year-on-year comparison of the load on the cycling network in Prague for the years 2018 to 2022. It shows a slight increase in cycling in 2022 compared to 2021 and also compared to 2018. The highest intensity of cycling traffic in Prague was in 2020," adds Jaroslav Mach, Head of the Transport Development Department at the Prague City Hall. From a baseline value of 100 in 2018, the cycling index reached its peak in 2020 with a value of 113. In 2021, the index value decreased to 106.2, marking a slight decrease from the previous peak. In 2022, there is a slight increase to 106.5.
Cycle counters provide useful real-time data on cyclist movements. This is an indirect support for cycling in the city. They serve as one of the tools to monitor the implementation of the Concept for the Development of Cycling and Recreational Cycling in Prague and as a support tool for other initiatives related to the development of cycling and its infrastructure in the capital. With appropriate technology, directional passages of cyclists are recorded directly at the measurement point with directional resolution. The data is collected in real time (or 5-minute intervals) into the Golemio data platform.
If you are interested in more information about cycling in Prague and the new dashboard, visit the Cycling in Prague website.
