Forward Pinellas Trail Count Program
Forward Pinellas monitors the countywide transportation system to identify trends over time and make informed decisions on future transportation investments, in its role as the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Pinellas County. In 2016, Forward Pinellas began collecting data on the number of people walking and bicycling on our county trails.
With funding from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) Partnership in Community Health (PICH) program, automated trail counters were installed along the Pinellas Trail to collect the number of users along trails in Pinellas County. The counters accurately and consistently count users, differentiate between pedestrians and bicyclists, and log the day, time and direction of travel using electromagnetic and infrared technology.
Trail counters have been installed in eight different sections of the Pinellas Trail: East Lake, Palm Harbor, Dunedin, Clearwater, Walsingham, Seminole, Bay Pines, and St. Petersburg. Pinellas County Public Works assisted with setting up the counters. Prior to installation of the counters, Forward Pinellas only collected permanent, ongoing data for motor vehicles, making it difficult to determine the number of people using trails in Pinellas County and to track the impact of trail investments.
Forward Pinellas has recorded 12.9 million trail users from 2017-2023. 2.1 million users enjoyed the trails in 2023 alone.
Data provided by these counters has proven beneficial to Forward Pinellas and our partners. Pinellas County has used the data to support grant applications for new trail construction and for Trail Ranger staffing. The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) keep records of trail use statewide. At Forward Pinellas, we have used the data to report monthly usership and develop a database to track long-term trends. For instance, with the COVID-19 pandemic we saw usage of the Pinellas Trail increase by 50% from 2019 to 2020, with the increase in usage holding steady since then.
Since establishment of our count program, the Florida Department of Transportation has developed their own non-motorized traffic count program to develop a statewide repository of data. We have worked closely with their program and were successful in partnering with FDOT to have them install a counter on the Courtney Campbell Causeway Trail and three counters along the Pinellas Trail Loop over the past two years. We plan to continue this successful partnership with FDOT, as well as expanding our counter program to cover on-road bicycle facilities over the next few years.
Trail Counter Dashboard
To provide greater public access to our dataset, we developed an interactive dashboard that displays our counter data. Users can filter by counter location, by month, and by year. The Dashboard will be updated annually with new data as it is collected. The Dashboard is intended to allow our partners and the public the ability to quickly access our Non-Motorized Trail Count data and see trends over time.
