Coming from the political context of why the counters are in place, we see that the bike counters are just one part of a huge set of measurements taken to reach climate neutrality in Hessen. Political decision making processes also take long journeys with many turning points until something like the bike counters is actually installed. From there, a small data journey starts that brings particular information back into bigger processes, like data models, where they seem to get invisible among many other types of data.
So far the main "fork" seems the use for either the State or the municipality. One difference I found so far is that for Frankfurt the installed counters are considered to deliver context-/place-specific numbers of bike use, hence allowing to monitor a very specific site where the bike counters are installed. At the level of the State of Hesse, the 270 counters spread over the whole state are considered to provide representative data for planning bike infrastructure in the State. I wonder how we can attend to the different pathways taken and where data are transformed in different ways to become either context-specific or representative.