Did you know how much traffic uses the bridge, and what proportion are cyclists? Hampshire County Council ran traffic surveys in 2005 and again in 2011 to find out. The raw results are pretty complicated, but Cycle Hayling has done some hard work so you don’t have to.
Here are the highlights (remember this is now 4 years out of date) :
- The bridge averaged 26-27,000 vehicle movements every weekday during summer 2011. Nearly all would go straight on through Stoke, and it’s WAY, WAY OVER the DfT recommended load for a road of this type.
- And yes, over 400 were bikes! Including 3 or 4 a day between midnight and 6am!
- Cycling averaged 1.8% of all traffic movements during the summer month weekends, and 1.4% on weekdays.
- It’s almost certain that cycling went well over 2% during better weather, as the figures average over a month.
- Cycling grew by 18% between 2005 and 2011, whereas other vehicles fell by 2%.
- I believe the cycle stats are dramatically on the low side, due to the placement of the traffic counters :
- According to the ‘Site Map’ tab, I would never show on these stats, because at the Hayling end of the bridge, I’d be on the pavement, missing the road counters (118/120), and at the Langstone end I’d be back on the road, missing the pavement counters as well (117/119). And I’d guess that would apply to many riders.
- Furthermore, one would expect the North and South bound totals per day to broadly cancel out, as they do for cars. But they don’t – they’re as much as 19% different – which supports the ‘missing data’ argument above.
- So either lots of cyclists are doing one way by bike and carrying the bike the other way by car, bus or ferry, or the counters are missing lots of them.
Checkout the summary results by clicking these links for Langstone Bridge Traffic 2005 and Langstone Bridge Traffic 2011. For real masochists, the spreadsheet with all the detailed figures is at Langstone Bridge Traffic v3.
We’re trying to find out if Hampshire have any more recent stats.
We think cycling has increased significantly in popularity in the 4 years since 2011 – what do you think?
Even at 2%, cyclist figures are dramatically low, given the flat terrain and generally clement weather,
The reason, as most cyclists know, is the generally unattractive cycling experience on Hayling roads, the lack of any dedicated and good quality cycle track and the poor solution to cycling over the bridge. Once over the bridge, cycling is a generally pleasant and well resourced experience!
Very interesting stats and much thanks are due to you for taking all that trouble to discover the awful truth. I have often waited at the pedestrian/bike crossing point to get to the track on the other side of the main road where the old toll gate was and counted the passing traffic thundering by to fill the ages it can take to find a gap. Or,as does happen now and then, have a cycle-friendly driver actually stop and wave me across. Based on time between vehicles on each side of the road passing my spot at different times of day and then doing an average and factoring in a very, very low count at night, I came to the conclusion it could be between 30-50,000 vehicle movements across the bridge every 24 hours. My very rule-of-thumb guestimate was clearly not that far off, bearing in mind as there are now more people and properties on the island than in 2011. It is quite mind-numbing when you think there are probably coming up for twice the number of vehicle movements on and off a ‘dead-end’ island (ergo absolutely no through traffic as happens with other towns and places).than there are people living on Hayling! If you also consider that at least half the residents are too young or too old to drive or have a car and lots of others do not drive, it becomes even more scary….