Not to question the important of the bridge but I've seen the number of 16,000 people crossing by foot and bike each day quoted a number of times. This seems a very high number and would imply that a substantial proportion of the local population use the bridge every day. It may be that there is a double count and actually 'people' represents the same person going both ways so the total number of individuals would be 8,000 but even then I struggle to get to such a big number.I have crossed the bridge many times at what might be regarded as rush hour and don't recall ever seeing more than 30 pedestrians or cyclists on the bridge at any given time. If you generously assume it takes two minutes to cross the bridge and this peak level of use is sustained for four hours a day and make some reasonable assumptions about usage at other hours, I find it very hard to get to a total number of more than 6,000. This is still a big number so the campaign would lose little by adopting a more conservative estimate whereas it could lose credibility if it was shown to be using numbers that were inflated.
Paul Corcoran ● 2247d