Thirty-five people walked by Gil Hawkins in 15 minutes. He counted.
He was on a mission.
Hawkins (pictured) was among scores of volunteers who fanned through downtown mid-day Wednesday to track the number of cyclists and pedestrians traveling through five different intersections, and to count the number of cars at various lots and other parking areas.
The watchers took part in an annual city government “Point in Time” count. The ritual helps the transportation office department assess supply and demand at parking facilities and gather data to “design sustainable transportation programs and plan for new pedestrian signals,” according to an official statement.
Hawkins, a longtime planner in the City Plan Department, claimed a perch on the northwest corner of Elm and Orange Streets. He tracked people walking north.
Directly across the street, Illisa Kelman sat on storefront steps to note the number of pedestrians, cyclists, and wheelchair-drivers heading east, also in quarter-hour intervals. She counted 15 from 11:30 to 11:45. Foot traffic picked up the next quarter hour in the midday sun.
Kelman, a grant writer for the parks department, was in good spirits as she kept count.
“I love to tan,” she said.
In all 40 people, largely volunteers, participated in the count Wednesday, according to Mike Piscitelli, the city’s traffic chief.
“We’re still crunching the numbers now. We’ll know more about it in a week or two when we actually get the numbers back,” Piscitelli said late Thursday.
“Anecdotally,” Piscitelli said, the counters have been discovering a growing number of pedestrians and cyclists on downtown streets each year. Street life is apparently booming.
The count will help the city make decisions about how to accommodate walkers and bikers. For instance, nine new traffic signals are going up around the new downtown campus of Gateway Community College. At some of those intersections the city wants to install “bicycle boxes” — basically extra “breathing room” for cyclists to make left turns. The count will help the city figure out where to put them.
doing this only in mid-November will result in a substantial under-count of bicyclists