Richardson Wants Volunteers to Count Bikes and Boots on the Ground Before June Ends

Before the Summer Heat Drives Everyone Indoors, Richardson Still Needs a Few More Volunteers

If you have walked the Cottonwood Trail on a Tuesday morning or noticed the painted green bike lanes running alongside Arapaho Road, you have probably never stopped to wonder who is counting you. Somebody is — or at least, somebody should be. That is the premise behind Richardson’s “Counting People, Planning Progress” program, a volunteer-driven active transportation survey that has been running since May 1 and closes out at the end of June 2026.

Sign-ups stop in the last week of June, which means the window for getting involved is measured in days rather than weeks at this point. The city is asking residents to station themselves at designated spots along bike lanes, shared-use trails, and roadways and do something deceptively simple: watch who passes by and record what they see.

What Counters Actually Do

The work itself is straightforward. Volunteers observe and tally pedestrians, cyclists, and other active transportation users moving through a specific corridor during an assigned time window. There is no specialized equipment required and no traffic-engineering background expected. What the program does ask for is reliability — showing up at the agreed location and paying attention.

The data collected feeds directly into the city’s effort to understand how people are actually moving around Richardson outside of cars. That distinction matters more than it might seem at first. Richardson has invested in trail corridors, on-street bike infrastructure, and sidewalk connectivity over many years, but raw infrastructure counts only tell part of the story. A protected bike lane might be technically available seven days a week and still see very different use patterns depending on the time of day, the adjacent land use, or the season. Survey counts introduce a human layer of observation that automated sensors often miss, capturing the pedestrian walking to the DART station, the kid on a scooter heading toward a park, or the lunchtime jogger who disappears from any data set the moment she steps off the marked path.

Why This Moment Matters for the City

Richardson is in the middle of a longer arc of transportation thinking. The region around CityLine, for instance, has grown into a genuinely walkable district in a metropolitan area not historically known for producing them. The intersection of Highway 75 and the President George Bush Tollway anchors a corridor where people commute on foot between DART’s CityLine/Bush station and office towers with enough regularity that the behavior is no longer a novelty.

Beyond CityLine, the broader city trail system links residential neighborhoods to parks, schools, and retail in ways that community plans have envisioned for decades. Whether those connections are working — whether people are finding them intuitive and safe enough to actually use — is a question that requires observation, not just a map overlay.

The program’s stated goal is to give the city a more nuanced view of how volumes of users biking and walking differ across different parts of Richardson. That phrasing is worth dwelling on. “Nuanced” in this context means the difference between a trail segment in a neighborhood with strong cycling culture and one that passes through an area where families want to walk but feel uncertain about crossings. Planners cannot address gaps they cannot see, and they cannot see gaps without counts taken at enough locations to allow comparison.

A Volunteer Opportunity With a Direct Line to Planning Decisions

Many volunteer programs in Richardson are valuable in ways that are somewhat diffuse — a cleanup day makes a park nicer, a food drive helps neighbors in need. Both matter enormously. But “Counting People, Planning Progress” is unusual in that volunteers are producing a specific dataset that will be analyzed and used to evaluate how active transportation is changing in the city. The output has a clear downstream application.

For residents who have opinions about a particular trail connection, a bike lane that feels underused, or a crosswalk that seems to draw a lot of pedestrian activity, participation in a count is a way to contribute something concrete to the conversation rather than simply filing a comment.

The program also pairs naturally with other things the city has been building out this summer. Richardson’s Parks and Recreation department has been running an active calendar through June — the Urban Naturalist series is drawing residents into Breckinridge Park and other natural areas, Movies in the Park is filling green spaces after dark, and the Family 4th Celebration at Breckinridge Park on July 4 will remind the city once more how much life its outdoor infrastructure supports when activated. Counting the people who access those spaces on foot and by bike throughout an ordinary week is part of understanding what makes them viable year-round.

How to Get Involved Before the Deadline

The City of Richardson Parks and Recreation community events page is where interested residents can find sign-up information. Given that registration closes in the last week of June, anyone interested in participating should move on it this weekend rather than adding it to the mental list of things to get to eventually.

The commitment is modest. The data will outlast the summer.