Well, hopefully, nobody’s looking at their numbers too closely. As it turns out, the usage of their log is pretty poor. While they don’t normally report details, they DID proudly trumpet them for the 2008 and 2009 “National Bike to Work Day.” The results, IMO, speak for themselves, and they might explain why they don't summarize any results for the 2010 Bike to Work Day.
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| 2008 "Bike to Work Day" PR |
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| 2009 "Bike to Work Day" PR |
As you may see, in a metropolitan area of well over six million people, yours truly, all by himself, represented 5% of the total bicycle commute miles logged. However, since only about 1000 people use the site, this semi-official site only attracts about 0.015% of the metropolitan population to use it and I would be loathe to accept any conclusions reached from such data. It also explains why NCTCOG has not put a lot of effort into making the site really very easy to use. I’m sure that with a calculator, my devoted reader could make all sorts of ludicrous conclusions from the results. Since you really can't enter "bicycle" as your commute mode, but only "bicycle/blade skate," it is POSSIBLE that everyone other than me that logged their miles those days in question were unrepentant blade skating commuters.
So, why do I use “tryparkingit?” Well, my employer is a sponsor of the clean air efforts and it seems sensible to support those efforts. Since I keep a continuing log based on the site in Excel, it also represents a continuing commute history that is very easy to maintain and that I can use to reconstruct my spreadsheet if it goes "blooey." BTW, the same spreadsheet also maintained "the Honk Project" data while that was ongoing.
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| Commute Log, Based on Data Originating from "Tryparkingit" - The Spreadsheet Has Grown Well Beyond its Origins |
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| Commie Monitor Refers to "Commute" Rather than Lenin's Fellow Travellers |
Still, 2011 is a NEW YEAR. It seems like a good time to look at other alternatives to record the daily commute. Revolution is in the air, so to speak. One of those alternatives used to be the DORBA “Commie Monitor” which is no longer generally available. Which also inspired the title of this post. I’ll try a sampling of other log sites. One I just signed up for is the Cateye-sponsored worldcommute.com log. Another that looks less friendly is bikecommutechallenge.com. I'm sure there are many others.
4 comments:
Good luck on your search. I try to keep track of my miles, but in a low-tech way (pocket calendar). Not so easy to add up all the miles, let alone keep track of other things.
I started putting my miles on Google Calendar, but I can't summarize easy there, either.
Let us know what you come up with.
I don't actually own a cycle computer, but don't most of them come with tracking software these days? I know my running garmin did like 5 years ago...
Cycling computers exist such as Cycler describes, but are very expensive compared to their running equivalents. To keep a running log, I find something that can export to Excel is good. I can do all sorts of things with the data once it's in Excel
We have a commute log on our internal website, at the Dept. of Trans. But, it doesn't show data for anyone other than the user. So, I have no idea if anyone else commutes in an alternate manner, unless I know them personally.
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No Need for Non-Robot proof here!