The Portland Bureau of Transportation just released its bicycle count for 2009, the important report that annually details the habits of Portland cyclists.

The report saw some controversy even before it was released. After getting a draft copy of the report last month, Willamette Week's Beth Slovic ran a news lead headlined "Backpedaling", which highlighted the report's findings that bike trips decreased in Portland during 2009 for the first time in 5 years.

But the full evidence shows that Portlanders made less trips by all modes of transportation in 2009. Perhaps due to the loss of many downtown jobs, people drove less to downtown, bussed less to downtown and, yes, biked less to downtown. The decreases are similarly steep for all modes and so, despite the hubbub around a drop-off in biking, "The percentage of Portlanders who ride bikes, however, does not appear to have significantly changed," says the report.

The count shows that there was a 4.5 percent decrease in bike trips citywide last year, but a seven percent drop in car trips and a seven percent drop in bus trips. A blog post at WWeek this week acknowledged that car travel also declined, but calling out a decrease in bike trips without waiting for the necessary context that transit trips are declining overall is, in my opinion, misleading.

"When people first started hearing that the number of bike trips were down last year, a lot of people said, 'Oh that means there are less people riding their bikes.' What this shows is that's not true," says the Portland Department of Transportation's Dan Anderson. "It's not that people are riding less, it's maybe that people have less places to go. When the unemployment rate goes up, the number of trips goes down."

Here are the conclusions from the final report:

•Although the number of bike trips on the four bridges were down, so was the number of trips made by drivers and transit riders. Because of this overall trend, bicyclists still represented approximately 13 percent of all vehicles crossing those bridges — the same percentage as in 2008.
• Bicycles represent 21 percent of all vehicles on the Hawthorne Bridge, up one percentage point from 2008. Bicycles represented 12 percent, 18 percent and 5 percent of all vehicles on the Broadway, Steel and Burnside bridges, respectively, compared to 14 percent, 15 percent and 5 percent in 2008.
• Adjusted for the 2009 decrease, the overall trend in bicycle traffic is up, increasing 180 percent since the 2000/2001 counts.

What did decline slightly in 2009: helmet usage (down three percent, to 77 percent of riders wearing helmets) and female riders (down one percent, to 31 percent of total riders).

The report also shows that the 60 percent of Portlanders are "interested but concerned" about riding a bike. Investing in safer, more expansive infrastructure for bikes, say by funding the 2030 Bike Plan which goes to council February 4th, could do a lot to help that majority of the city who want to ride bikes feeling comfortable enough to cycle in Portland.

Download the full pdf of the report here to check it out for yourself.