Counting Feet and Wheels Across Richardson
Somewhere on a Richardson bike lane or trail this month, a volunteer with a clipboard — or a tally counter, or a phone app — is watching people go by. Walkers, joggers, cyclists, parents with strollers, kids on scooters. Each one gets counted. The program running behind that quiet act of observation is the City of Richardson’s Active Transportation Volunteer Program, which runs through June 30, 2026, and covers bike lanes, trails, and roadways throughout the city.
The premise is straightforward: the city wants to know how residents are actually using its active transportation infrastructure, and counting people manually, at real locations and real times, is one of the most reliable ways to find out. The data collected through volunteer counts will help the city evaluate how active transportation patterns are shifting across Richardson — which corridors are busy, which are underused, and where investment or programming might make a difference.
It is the kind of civic work that rarely draws headlines, but it has a direct line to decisions that shape everyday life in a community: whether a trail extension gets prioritized, whether a bike lane feels safe enough to use, whether the city’s active transportation network is actually serving the people it was built for.
What Volunteers Actually Do
Participants in the program are assigned to specific locations — bike lanes, shared-use paths, or roadway segments — and record the number of pedestrians, cyclists, and other active transportation users passing through during a set observation window. The methodology mirrors what transportation planners call manual turning movement counts or screenline counts, adapted here for a volunteer context.
No specialized background is required. The value the program draws on is simply consistent, attentive observation across multiple points in the city simultaneously. A single automated sensor can track one location continuously; a network of volunteers can capture a citywide snapshot that no sensor array could replicate at comparable cost.
The window for participation runs May 1 through June 30, 2026, which means anyone interested still has most of the month of June to get involved. Details and sign-up information are available through the City of Richardson’s parks and recreation department.
Why Richardson Is Collecting This Data Now
Richardson has been building out its active transportation network for years — trail connections, protected bike lanes, sidewalk improvements — and as that infrastructure matures, the city faces the same question every municipality eventually encounters: is it working? Are people using what was built, and in the ways it was intended?
Answering that question requires data that goes beyond construction completion. A trail can be finished and ribbon-cut and still see minimal use if it does not connect to where people want to go, if it feels unsafe at certain times of day, or if residents simply do not know it exists. Conversely, infrastructure that looks modest on paper can turn out to be heavily used once you actually put someone there to count.
The volunteer count program gives the city a ground-level, human-scale read on those questions across the full network rather than at a handful of instrumented locations. That kind of distributed observation is difficult to replicate any other way, and it tends to surface patterns that aggregate data misses.
A Richardson-Specific Effort
Richardson’s trail and active transportation network threads through a city that is simultaneously a dense inner suburb with established neighborhoods and a community that has been actively adding infrastructure over the past decade. The mix of commuter cyclists using lanes along major corridors, families on weekend trail loops, and pedestrians moving through neighborhood streets creates a varied and sometimes counterintuitive usage picture.
The volunteer count program is calibrated to capture that variety. By deploying observers across bike lanes, trails, and roadways — rather than focusing only on one type of facility — the data set will reflect how different parts of the network function and who is using them.
For residents who have wondered whether their input actually feeds into city planning in any tangible way, this program is a relatively concrete answer. The counts are not advisory in a vague sense; they are input data for transportation evaluation, the kind of information that planners cite when making the case for infrastructure decisions.
How to Get Involved Before June 30
The program is open to Richardson residents, and the participation window closes at the end of this month. The City of Richardson’s parks and recreation department is the point of contact, with program information and registration available through the city’s community events page at cor.net.
For anyone already spending time outdoors this summer — on Richardson’s trails, near the Spring Creek Corridor, or along the city’s bike infrastructure — adding a volunteer count session to that time is a low-barrier way to contribute something measurable to how the city understands and plans its transportation network.
The data will not produce immediate visible changes. That is not how infrastructure planning works. But the counts taken this spring and early summer will become part of the record that Richardson’s planners draw on when the next round of active transportation decisions comes up for discussion. That is a longer loop than most volunteer programs promise, but it is also a more durable one.