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.
How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means
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.
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 →📊 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.