Bike New York’s Director of Advocacy, Jon Orcutt, keeps a pulse on all things #BikeNYC. He gave us a quick update on bike use on New York City’s bridges in 2021!

Bike use on the five-city bridges with automated bike counters increased 3.6% in 2021 over 2020. That’s on top of the large 23% jump we saw in 2020 as the pandemic pushed more people outdoors for both transportation and exercise.

Interestingly, we didn’t see the same peak use this past summer that we saw in Summer 2020, but broad increases in cold-weather riding generated full-year bike volume increases on the Queensboro and Manhattan Bridges.

Of course, the big bridge story of 2021 was the Brooklyn Bridge separated bikeway. These factors more than made up for slight volume declines on the Williamsburg and Pulaski Bridges.  

Reminder

Your support allows us to see key bike data like this. In 2019, Bike New York campaigned for the New York City Department of Transportation’s automated bike data to be made public. The city began posting monthly updates in January 2020, just in time to document the Covid Bike Boom!

Written by Bike New York’s Director of Advocacy, Jon Orcutt.