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Staff Feature – Counting Park and Trail Visitors

August 16, 2021

How have you stayed active and relaxed during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Hundreds of thousands of people have been exploring TRCA parks and trails during this time. In fact, we saw a 35% increase in the number of trail users between 2019 and 2020.

How do we know this? We have 68 TRAFx trail counters installed at trail access points across TRCA Conservation Parks and Conservation Lands.

A total of 37 counters have been permanently installed at eight Conservation Lands since 2019, and we have been rolling out more since then.

We have also been working closely with the City of Toronto to rotate multiple counters across their trail network each year in support of their trail and park development and maintenance projects.

This spring and summer we installed 21 additional counters at TRCA’s Conservation Parks to better understand the number of visitors who are not coming on through our front gates.

Seven counters were installed in TRCA’s Duffins Headwaters Properties in early June with Green Durham Association, which purchased the counters and helped to install the posts.

TRCA team member Pradeep Banskota installs a trail counter at Beare Hill Park
Green Durham Association volunteers install trail counter posts in the East Duffins Headwaters in Uxbridge
TRCA team member Isaac Mazer inspects a trailhead kiosk and sign at Bolton Resource Management Tract in Caledon

Above, left to right: Pradeep Banskota installing a trail counter at Beare Hill Park in Toronto; Green Durham Association volunteers installing trail counter posts in the East Duffins Headwaters in Uxbridge (photo courtesy of E. Calvin); Isaac Mazer inspecting a trailhead kiosk and sign at Bolton Resource Management Tract in Caledon

Every other week, our dedicated Conservation Lands Program Assistants Pradeep Banskota, Isaac Mazer, and Krishna Selvakumar collect data from the trail counters. At the same time, the team is cleaning up parking lots and trailhead areas, inspecting our signs, and providing excellent customer service to visitors.

Steve Roesch advises on counter locations and compiles and reports on all the data, and Brian Bertrand arranges for the specially designed trail posts to be constructed and installed with Restoration and Infrastructure (Construction Services).

So what do we do with this information once we have it?

We continue to use this information in our land and trail planning initiatives so that we have a sense of where park and trail users most often visit and when. We also report on trail user counts monthly as part of our Performance Metrics reporting, and in the TRCA Annual Reports.

In addition, we are including numbers in reports and presentations to demonstrate the value that our parks and trails provide to communities, to leverage investment in our assets.

Doing so was extremely effective in TRCA’s efforts to garner support from all levels of government for investment in Petticoat Creek Conservation Park (check out the April 2021 TRCA Board of Directors report).

The trail counters initiative is one part of how TRCA is counting the number of people visiting our parks and trails.

We also collect information through gate admissions and program participation records. In addition, Corporate Services (Business Information and Data Analytics), Restoration and Infrastructure, and Conservation Parks and Lands divisions are working together to get more visitor data at select sites through Environics MobileScapes ENVISION.

Thank you to all Conservation Lands staff for these amazing efforts that allow our communities have safe and enjoyable experiences at our parks and lands!