Andrássy lanes drawing a crowd

Photo from the "Happy Mass" celebration following the christening of the red lanes this past May.
Photo stolen from cyclechic.blog.hu.

Andrássy út, with its new twin red bike lanes, generates about 1,000 bike trips per day, according to a post on Kerékagy. Budapest's showcase boulevard now draws about 6,000 cyclists per week and 23-24,000 per month.

The data was collected by an automatic counter installed with no fanfare in June by BKK, the umbrella organisation in charge of city transport. As on the kiskörút and on other streets where cyclists have been counted in recent years, the traffic on Andrássy is consistently higher on weekdays than on weekends.

As Kerékagy noted, this indicates that Budapest has a well-developed transport cycling culture. This has been true for several years already, but even less than a decade ago, Budapest had very little bike traffic, and the traffic that did exist was almost all on weekends.

If you're a cyclist you might not be surprised that 1,000 trips per day does not make Andrássy a major cycling street in Budapest. The kiskörút was averaging more than twice as much bike traffic this past summer. And on the Buda-side riverbank path, the numbers are apparently even higher. Critical Mass organiser Gábor Kürti recently did a manual count of traffic at Gellert tér, and he  reported counting 216 cyclists in just 10 minutes during rush hour.