Evaluation of Bicycle Counts in the Netherlands

Videos were taken at the test location on Wednesday 9 Oct 2013 (afternoon) and Thursday 10 Oct 2013 (morning). With these videos the actual traffic passages (the ‘reality’) can be established and used for the evaluation and comparison of the three counting systems.

In this memo a short description of the evaluation outcomes is presented.
 

Results
Table 3.1 shows the hourly traffic counts as registered by video and by the three counting systems. The general implications are:
 

• Dinaf registered the highest number of bicycle passages. For some periods the Dinaf count is even higher than reality (as established by video). This is attributed to possible ghost/double registrations in the Dinaf counts. Because the Dinaf data only contain hourly counts, it is no possible to investigate the deviations further.
• MetroCount registered slightly less passages than Dinaf, but the MetroCount results are more agreeable with reality than the Dinaf results are (looking at the magnitudes and variation of the hourly deviations). Further analysis of individual passages shows that when a group of bi-cycles passed the test location, MetroCount sometimes missed a bicycle.
• EcoCounter showed the biggest deviations from reality (average for the 12 hourly periods: 11.9%). There is further a big fluctuation in the variation from period to period.
• In total for the 12 hourly periods, Dinaf has the smallest variation from reality (1.2%), MetroCount slightly bigger (4.5%). However, the hourly deviations of Dinaf varies greatly from period to period, in comparison to those of MetroCount.

Table 3.2 shows the total traffic counts by the three systems for a whole period of nearly two weeks (from 1 to 13 Oct 2013). The results here indicate that:

• The difference between Dinaf count and MetroCount count is relatively small (less than 2%). Here the Dinaf count is slightly higher than the MetroCount count.
   

Conclusions
In terms of total count, Dinaf shows the smallest deviation. However, the hourly deviations of MetroCount are more stable than Dinaf.

An advantage of MetroCount is that it uses piezoelectric strips which can be buried beneath the road surface, instead of test tubes which are laid above the road surface. This requires less maintenance and also causes no hindrance to the bicycle traffic.