Webinar Recap: Bikes Count in the Big Easy

How can data tell the story of cycling in your community? Together with our friends at Eco-Counter, we hosted the third-annual ‘Bikes Count’ Data Competition to explore this question with communities across the country. 

We’re excited to share that this year’s competition winner is University of New Orleans Transportation Institute (UNO)! Their application showcased an impressive collaborative effort among research partners, the city government’s Moving New Orleans Bikes initiative, and advocacy organization Bike Easy in collecting and understanding data in New Orleans. 

Our recent webinar, “Bikes Count in the Big Easy: A snapshot of Cycling in New Orleans” dove into the data challenges faced by UNO and their collaborators. The webinar emphasizes the importance of data in planning and the various ways it can be used, from short-term insights to long-term projections, economic impact analysis, and data fusion with other sources.

Watch the webinar recording below to find out what to do with data once it’s collected and how to utilize it for storytelling, advocacy, and understanding bicycling in a community! 

Congratulations to the University of New Orleans for winning this year’s data competition! The results are incredibly helpful both for local application in New Orleans as well as on a wider scale in helping us highlight the importance of partnerships when collecting, utilizing, and storytelling with data. Thank you to Eco-Counter for their continued participation in this work!

Find all our past webinars on data collection and analysis best practices here, and check out Bike Easy’s Count Dat dashboard for additional inspiration for what it looks like to make data accessible for the public. You can also look for funding opportunities to support your communities’ bike count and data collection efforts on FHWA’s Funding table.