Better bike-on-bus planning starts with better data. Every year, an estimated 9.1 million bike-on-bus trips happen across North America, but transit agencies still can't see what's happening on their own bike racks, riders board without knowing if there's room, and agencies plan without knowing where the gaps are.

Making Multimodal Mobility Visible, a joint analysis by WSP and Sportworks, looks at what happens when agencies replace manual counts and periodic studies with automated, IoT-based tracking. Drawing on pilot data from the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority and San Diego Metropolitan Transit System, the report shows what real-time bike occupancy data actually reveals, and what agencies can do with it.

What’s inside:

• Why manual counting and CAD/AVL integration methods fall short for modern bike-on-bus planning

• What 13 months of pilot data from VTA and SDMTS reveal about ridership patterns, denied boardings, and rack capacity

• How real-time occupancy data, published through GTFS-RT, closes the visibility gap for riders and third-party trip planning apps

• How smart bike parking extends the same data model beyond the bus to the full multimodal trip

• A three-phase implementation framework for piloting, scaling, and sustaining automated tracking agency-wide

Download the report to see how closing the bike-on-bus data gap can sharpen fleet planning, cut denied boardings, and make multimodal transit visible for every rider.