Cycle Counting Loops and Their Published Failure Rate
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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Counting cyclists is easy; admitting the counter was broken is not. Nantes ships a daily anomaly flag on its own cycle counters — and it fires on 7.5% of counter-days.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 3 more in Nantes · 🚲 Cycling guide · 🚲 Mobility projects
Nantes Métropole runs a network of inductive counting loops in its cycle infrastructure and publishes what they record. Seventy-six loops are listed as in service with their coordinates, and 68 of them appear in the daily counting series, which runs from 1 January 2020 to the present and is republished each morning at 08:00 for the previous day. Each record is one loop-day carrying 24 hourly columns, a daily total, the weekday and the school-holiday period. Unusually, each record also carries the metropolis's own estimate of whether that counter was malfunctioning that day, and a separate historical file covers 2014–2019 for the 20 older loops whose data it considers usable at all.
📊 Impact
Between 1 January 2020 and 8 August 2026 the series holds 144,454 loop-days across 68 counters. The metropolis flags 10,889 of them — 7.5% — as probably faulty: 9,318 with a high probability of anomaly and 1,571 with a low one. The loops together recorded 16,890,962 passages during 2025.
🎓 Lesson
Publishing the defect rate is the useful part; the counts themselves resist naive comparison. The 2020 baseline is a lockdown year, the number of reporting loops grows across the series, and the metropolis warns in the dataset itself that faults also produce under- and over-counts that its flag is not designed to catch — so year-on-year cycling growth cannot be read off this file without correction. The honesty is in the caveat, not in a headline number.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Cycle Counting Loops and Their Published Failure Rate” — Nantes, France. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/nantes-bike-counters/ (last verified 2026-08-10). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.