Hi there! As the weather is heating up, every possible type of bicycle is being prepared for an amazing year of cycling!

In the Active Transportation world, we are getting ready for the roll-out of Cochrane’s first ‘Walk and Bike to School’ program. We’re really excited about bringing bike safety, safer connectivity for kids and adults, and just fun on bikes to the schools of Cochrane. Watch this space for more on this program, and if you’re interested in volunteering, our Active Transportation Committee can always use more help - email to paul@bikecochrane.com.

Thanks to all of you who responded to our ‘Wheeling and Walking’ survey in December and January. With a strong response (N=120), we had almost half the respondents for a typical ‘Let’s Talk Cochrane’ survey, so we were pleased to see the diversity and thoughtfulness in responses.

General conclusions from the survey are:

• People feel safe riding their bikes on protected, separated pathways

• People generally don’t feel safe riding on roads/highways.

• 62% of respondents felt that Bike Cochrane’s #1 priority should be advocating for improved connectivity/pathways in our town.

  Almost half (48%) of respondents LEAVE Cochrane at least once a week for riding. These are missed tourism dollars for Cochrane!

Specifically, both Sunset and Fireside were called out as communities that aren’t well-connected. While the upcoming Ranche House Master Plan should help connecting Sunset into the pathway system, Fireside is a bit more of a challenge. From our Active Transportation priorities work last year, we investigated an overpass for Highway 22 at James Walker Trail, but it’s definitely not a cheap option (~$1.8M) so it’ll take a bit more work to find better options here.

See below chart showing some of the barriers that stop people from biking for transportation:

Question 2 from Bike Cochrane’s Wheeling and Walking Survey Dec 2020-Jan 2021

In addition to our completed survey, we have also completed an agreement with the Town of Cochrane to partner on gathering better data. Through the generosity of Metrocount, we have a loaner bike counter that we’ll be deploying around Cochrane’s pathways this spring, summer, and fall to validate some of our data around usage, but also to get richer data sets around use in a number of pathways that will help us advocate more intelligently for better connectivity in Cochrane. We trialed it this winter and learned the ropes of analyzing these datasets so it’s ready for our busy biking season! If you see this sign on your pathways, know that you’re being counted and Bike Cochrane and the Town are working to make your town better!

If you are passionate about cycling and active transportation and have a few hours to volunteer, please email Paul at paul@bikecochrane.com. We’ll see you out there on your bike!

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.

Hello! If you’re reading this, you’re hopefully one of the many people who responded to our survey to tell Bike Cochrane that your #1 issue for us to advocate is ‘Improving Connectivity in Cochrane for Wheeling and Walking’!

Today, I wanted to share with our members some of the research your Active Transportation Committee has been doing around intersections in town. See below a clip of Strava Metro’s user data for the intersection of highway 22 and Fireside/James Walker Trail. Note that Strava (a self-recorded app for phones and wearable devices to track runners, cyclists, walkers) has opened their data set to Bike Cochrane to assist us in our efforts to advocate for improvements in cycling infrastructure. It will be supplemented with our planned traffic studies this summer using old-fashioned clipboards along with bike counter sensors, but for now it’s useful as a data set to set how our cyclists and walking traffic has increased dramatically (in the case below by 78% year over year from 2019 to 2020).

This data set helped Bike Cochrane push Alberta Transportation to prioritize re-painting this and other intersections ASAP in early 2021. It is also helping inform our project prioritizations with the Town of Cochrane and other stakeholders.

If you’re interested in this kind of data, and in advocating for safer cycling connectivity in Cochrane, please reach out to Paul@bikecochrane.com, and please fill in our Active Transportation Survey

Active Transportation Committee Update - 14 Dec 2020

Did you know that the Town of Cochrane commissioned a Bicycle Plan back in 2012 with strong recommendations to guide our town’s development towards being a better community for active transportation? This document, along with many, many hours of research into cycling infrastructure is what has been guiding Bike Cochrane’s Active Transportation Committee’s prioritized projects.

It is with these researched proposals, informed with cycling and pedestrian data, that Bike Cochrane will advocate for improvements in our town’s pathway network. Are you interested in being involved in this research and advocacy to improve your ability to bike your kids to school, or bike to work?

We will be presenting to Town Council on 25 Jan 2021 with our first priority project to begin seeking alignment and funding support. We plan to do active traffic studies this summer to supplement the data sets we’ve been gathering already. We have just launched our first survey of Bike Cochrane’s membership and will be fanning that out to the community to solicit further engagement and feedback.

Email Paul at Paul@BikeCochrane.com to see how you can help this effort. Watch this space for updates from our research as we begin to share some of our learnings with our membership and the greater community!