Bike Adelaide has completed the reports for this year’s “Super Tuesday” bike counting exercise. Many thanks to Fay and all the others who contributed on the first Tuesday in March and for all the subsequent analysis and documentation. The full cycling report (148 pages) is available here, plus the full walking report (89 pages) here.
A short summary
Bike Adelaide is pleased to provide an overview of the results of our 2026 Super Tuesday volunteer bike counts, held on 3 March 2026 from 7am to 9am and providing valuable data for our nine partner Councils. A visual summary of results is available via online interactive maps: here for cycling and here for walking. Detailed reports are available here for cycling and here for walking.13,519 cyclists were counted by our volunteers this year, at 132 sites. Our volunteers also counted walkers at about half the sites, recording 8,247 people on foot.
With slightly worse weather and multiple path closures across significant cycling routes, it is perhaps surprising that cyclists were only about 6% down from last year, but this is thanks to the scope of closures leading to us choose replacement sites. This continued the trend of decline seen since 2015; we attribute this to funding of active transport infrastructure being far below its modal share.
An added factor this year would be cheaper student public transport fares from July 2025. Adelaide Metro’s increase in fare validations has to have come from somewhere, and we think cycling to school is one casualty. A side effect is higher numbers walking to/from public transport stops. Our counts show an 11% increase in walking overall – but a fall near Glenunga High where students appear to have transferred from foot to bus.
Adelaide University’s decision to cease face-to-face lectures would’ve also cut many tertiary students and academics out of our count period.
The broader picture for cycling in the metro area is that access to the City from the north and west is noticeably worse than from the south and east, despite bike facilities supporting cycling in these areas. We have raised some route opportunities we noticed in passing. The Hill Street/ path through the golf course/ Possum Park/ River Torrens Linear Trail route will be a casualty of the golf course redevelopment and we hold fears for the impact of the Moto GP. We urge new infrastructure development to offset these.
And women continue to prefer using separated cycling paths over on-street paint, reaching up to some 30% of cyclists on the edge of the City despite the general lack of separated facilities into the CBD, with lower proportions elsewhere.