Dominic Treppeda rides his bike to work every day. From his house on the north end of town, he hops on his 1970 Motobecane road bike, puts in his headphones, then zips along the Animas River Trail to his serving job downtown.
Biking to work, rather than driving, is a great way to get some exercise, listen to music and decompress before and after a shift, he said.
“It makes going to work fun,” Treppeda said. “Driving down Main is not fun. It feels like driving on the Front Range, to be honest. Biking is just better.”
Treppeda is one of many Durango residents who are ditching the car and opting to walk or bike instead. And as more people make a point to not drive, the city of Durango is conducting a survey to gather data from key intersections around town to improve safety and efficiency for cars, bikes and walkers alike, said Durango multimodal specialist Liam Goettelman.
Every two years, the city recruits volunteers to count cyclists and pedestrians crossing eight high-volume locations around town, Goettelman said. Those include Main Avenue and 32nd Street; Florida Road and County Road 250; Main Avenue and Junction Creek Bridge; west Third Avenue and West Park Avenue; East Second Avenue and 15th Street; Camino del Rio and Ninth Street; and East Eighth Avenue and East Third Street.
“These locations are ones that we’ve been counting at since 2009,” Goettelman said. “We’ve kept it consistent, just so that we can have data that’s traceable throughout different years and can be analyzed to kind of really give us a good idea of the changing trends of sustainable transportation in town.”
Goettelman said the city’s 2023 Multimodal Transportation Plan identified eight key corridors, projects and intersections that see a high volume of traffic. The biennial survey counts how many bikers and walkers utilize that infrastructure.
That’s where the volunteers come in handy, he said.
“We just have people out at these different intersections,” Goettelman said. “We’ll provide them with a clipboard and a sheet, and if they want we’ve got some counters as well, and we just ask them to count the number of bikes and pedestrians that cross through that corridor.”
The locations were identified through community engagement, the city’s crash data network, and the data collected through past bike and pedestrian counts to inform how the city can improve them.
“On some of the larger volume roadways, such as the highways that run through towns, and at some of the crossings of those roadways, that’s where there are generally more pedestrian, bicycle and vehicle conflict,” Goettelman said.
The data that volunteers gather will then be analyzed by Goettelman and his colleagues at the Transportation Department. Those numbers equip the city with data it can use to obtain grants and make improvements that make Durango more friendly to all types of commuters. Many of the locations were identified in the Multimodal Transportation Plan as in need of improvement, Goettelman said.
“Some examples are the HAWK signal at Camino and 12th, which will eventually be replaced with a bike/pedestrian underpass connection to the river trail,” Goettelman wrote in a text. “The intersection at 2nd and 15th will be addressed in the midtown safety improvement projects.”
The city is looking for volunteers to staff the eight locations on Sept. 16, 17, 18 and 20. Volunteers will be given a clipboard, a counting sheet and a counter, as well as a free Klean Kanteen water bottle for their service, Goettelman said.
On the Sept. 16, 17 and 18, there will be a morning shift from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. to catch the morning commute, Goettelman said, and an evening shift from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. to count the evening rush. On Saturday, Sept. 20, there will be one shift from noon to 2 p.m. to count the weekend midday rush.
For more information on how to volunteer, visit https://www.durangoco.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=4298.
sedmondson@durangoherald.com
