City advances transportation data program; board approves $17,244 for two mobile video counters

City of Bend staff presented a new multimodal transportation data program and the policy board approved a one-time purchase of mobile video counters to strengthen bike and pedestrian counts and support travel-model calibration.

Jesse Thomas, who leads the city's Office of Performance Management, said the program will aggregate diverse data sources — permanent counters, connected-vehicle feeds, shared-mobility app data and community counts — into a data lake to produce repeatable, calibrated measures for planning and safety analysis. Thomas said the city plans to replace tube counters with camera-based counting at permanent locations and to deploy mobile camera counters to get accurate bike and pedestrian pre/post counts around projects.

On the funding request, Mike Riley moved approval of $17,244 to purchase two mobile counters; Ariel Mendez seconded. The board voted and the motion carried with one recorded opposition. Staff said most count and crash datasets will be made available on the city's open-data platform; some aggregated app-provider data will remain subject to vendor restrictions.

Thomas told the board that mobile counters (camera units) would run machine-learning algorithms to classify and count bikes, pedestrians and vehicles, and that annual connectivity and processing costs were modest (~$800/year) while the hardware for two mobile units required a one-time purchase. The data will support calibration of a new travel-demand model that will better capture bike and pedestrian movements, a need acknowledged by MPO staff.

Staff said funding for the two mobile counters will come from the MPO consultant budget line that currently carries unallocated funds; staff will return to the board with procurement details.