Visitor monitoring in the Karwendel: 55,000 mountain bikers counted in one summer
Gitta Beimfohr
· 30.10.2025
Anyone who turned off from Scharnitz into the Karwendel or Gleirschtal valley towards Pfeishütte this summer probably didn't even realise that they were being counted. The tall poles with the counting devices including solar panels, image sensors and infrared technology at the valley entrances are not small, but you have to bend your neck to spot the devices at a height of 4 to 5 metres between the branches of the trees.
This cross-border "Euregio" project between Bavaria and Tyrol has been running since January 2023. The aim of this project, which is said to have cost 100,000 euros, is to provide sustainable tourist guidance in the Karwendel Nature Park. Mountain bikers have been making a pilgrimage up here since the 1990s, pretty much at the same time as the Moser guide "Karwendel, Wetterstein, Werdenfels" was published. An onslaught that the Tyrolean nature park rangers would have liked to prevent at the time. However, they have still not been able to enforce a ban on mountain bikers on the main paths in the Karwendel valleys.
Counting stations are not even necessary to recognise this: There are still a lot of mountain bikers out and about in the western Karwendel. On a nice weekend, there is almost nowhere to park your bike in front of the Karwendelhaus (battery charging possible) or at the Falkenhütte (battery charging not possible). But "very many" is not a reliable figure, so they wanted to know exactly and installed the counting stations at the Scharnitz entrance to the Karwendel. Incidentally, these can distinguish between cyclists and pedestrians thanks to the built-in image sensors. The additionally installed infrared devices can in turn recognise the direction in which the people being counted are travelling.
Summer 2024: 55,000 bikers counted in the Karwendel
The project will run until the end of 2025, but the figures for the whole of 2024 have now been published and have astonished the nature park administration: around 55,000 cyclists were counted between January and December 2024 - and 23,000 pedestrians. In other words, more than twice as many cyclists as walkers. And if you consider that cyclists are practically only out and about in the Karwendel valleys from the end of May/beginning of June to October, then you get an average of just under 370 bikers per day. The counting facilities are said to have counted as many as 800 bikers on some peak days.
The question now is how the nature park administration will establish sustainable visitor guidance. The creation of new routes is probably out of the question in Austria's largest nature park. Instead, close cooperation with the tour portals Strava and Outdooractive is already being planned. Their user data (GPS tracking) is to be linked with the data counted on site. It is hoped that this will provide reliable figures on current and predicted utilisation in the Karwendel. If the traffic in the mountain valleys is already particularly heavy, the tour portals could suggest alternatives to their users in advance when planning.
Incidentally, the mountain trail users in the Zugspitze region are also counted within this project. However, their figures have not yet been published.
More and more bikers are travelling by train
Incidentally, Deutsche Bahn and ÖBB are also registering an increasing number of mountain bikers travelling towards Karwendel. This in turn leads to user conflicts when everyday commuters on regional trains meet mountain sports enthusiasts starting early in the morning with their bulky bikes. "Of course, we are trying to create space for bikes," ÖBB spokesperson Christoph Gasser-Mair explained to the Münchner Merkur newspaper. "Where possible, we extend trains. However, this is not possible on the Karwendel line between Innsbruck and Mittenwald due to the relatively short platforms.
At least ÖBB has now increased its bicycle transport facilities: the new local trains now have 24 bicycle parking spaces in the direction of Karwendel. But even these are likely to be quickly occupied at peak times between seven and eight in the morning. The railway therefore asks all cyclists to avoid these peak times.
Gitta Beimfohr
Editor
