Off topic, the Bay Area sucks again, because of the vast evil transportation conspiracy, as usual. But, now that I've "bit the chum"....

The only thing worse than your usual bouts useless gainsay and whining, are your conclusion as evidenced by that truly ignorant quote, and by the whining of the Bike folks in the article, who had all kinds of nonsense they pulled out of their butts, without any real supporting evidence, to offer as to "why" this change they don't seem to like has occurred...?

All I really know from this article is that they've done three of these "surveys", supposedly (hopefully?) asking the same question, and they now have three "surveys" (of an unknown sample size, sampling technique, or an identified "standard deviation" or "bound of error" based on that), to supposedly estimate the "true" population of bike trips.

And, I know they have used this to make this "estimate" about the total number of trips in any given year just 3 times. And, that this has obviously, by the flailing list of reasons and excuses they've conjured up, caused these bike folks all kinds consternation that these are not staying level and/or going up.

But, for all I really know, from what's presented in this article, about three surveys, is that they could have a methodology with a huge sampling variance, from any number of factors, and all of these three surveys could be within the "margin of error" of the real "population" of bike trips.

There are the statistics we like, there are statistics we don't like, and then there are statistics done with good data and good methodology, and that I can't ever dream of you being able to understand that, or to be able to tell the difference....