Swedish Immigrant Regional Trail
Sunrise Prairie Regional Trail
Published April 2020
During the summer and fall of 2019, Parks & Trails Council (P&TC) collaborated with Chisago County Parks to count visitors on the entire Chisago County regional trail system. Trail counts were conducted using automated trail counters — simple, dependable devices that count bicyclists and pedestrians as they pass by — at a total of 15 locations. Counts were taken for periods of 14 to 27 days and extrapolated to season-long estimates using the day-of-year factoring method.
Key Findings
Trail users traveled 381,000 miles on the Chisago County regional trail system in 2019.
Bicyclists and pedestrians, in sum, traveled approximately 381,000 miles on the Chisago County regional trail system between April 2019 and October 2019. That’s a distance equivalent to circling the earth at the equator 15 times. An estimated 280,000 of those miles were traveled on the Sunrise Prairie Trail, with the remaining 101,00 miles traveled on the Swedish Immigrant Trial.
Trail use is nearly a 50/50 split between bicyclists and pedestrians, with bicyclists accounting for a slight majority of system-wide traffic.
Across the Chisago County regional trail system, bicycling accounts for just over half (52%) of trail use. The majority of bicycle use occurs on the Sunrise Prairie Trail, where 56% of trail users are bicyclists. Conversely, 60% of trail users on the Swedish Immigrant Trail are pedestrians.
