The Grow Cycling Toolkit

Metrics

Defining success, and establishing metrics at the outset for evaluating success, are critical to understanding the impact of actions for growing cycling. Identifying goals, and to what extent interventions are helping achieve those goals, can quantify success and underscore the value of initial investments. This analysis and value proposition can also help make the case to elected officials for continued funding, resources, and projects over time.

Once indicators are identified and before any interventions are implemented, baselines should be established, as should a process for collecting and analyzing data. Understanding what data needs to be collected to measure progress will be critical. Indicators should then be measured over time to track progress from the baseline.

Here are suggestions for goal-oriented indicators that can be used to evaluate the systemwide success of cycling interventions.

• Goal: Increase Number and Diversity of People Cycling

  Indicators	Data sets needed	Collection details
  Number of cyclists on key corridors Number of female cyclists on key corridors Number of specific minority cyclists on key corridors	- Cyclist counts - Travel surveys	Counts can be conducted: - Using automated bicycle traffic counters - Manually by city staff or volunteers

• Goal: Increase Access to Safe Cycling Infrastructure

  Indicators	Data sets needed	Collection details
  People near bicycle infrastructure Km of protected bicycle lanes per capita Km of bicycle lanes per km of roads	- Population - Geo-located bicycle infrastructure (shapefile) - Total km of bicycle infrastructure	If “people near bicycle infrastructure” is defined using streets (as opposed to direct distance), a network data set will also be needed

• Goal: Increase Access to Destinations

  Indicators	Data sets needed	Collection details
  Access to people by bicyclea	- Population - Road network	If access routes are restricted to streets with bicycle lanes, a geo-located bicycle lane shapefile will also be needed

  ^a Access to people is used as a proxy for access to destinations.
• Goal: Reduce Single-Occupancy Vehicle Trips

  Indicators	Data sets needed	Collection details
  Mode share	Travel surveys

• Goal: Reduce Cyclist Fatalities and Severe Injuries

  Indicators	Data sets needed	Collection details
  Number of cyclists KSI in crashes with vehicles	- Cyclists KSI	Cyclist KSI data may be obtained from city police departments or state or provincial crash databases

  Note: KSI = killed or severely injured.