Traffic count; is the count of vehicles which is conducted along a particular road, path or intersection.
Importance of traffic count
- To establish relative importance of any route or road facility.
- To decide the priority for improvement and expansion of a road and to allot the funds accordingly.
- To plan and design the existing and new facilities of traffic operations on the road.
- To make analysis of traffic pattern and trends on the road.
- To plan one-way street and other regulatory measures by volume distribution study.
- To do design of road intersections, planning signal timings and channelisation by turning movement study.
- To do planning of side walks, cross walks and pedestrian signals by pedestrian volume study.
- To do economic studies after estimating the highway user’s revenue
- To know the variation in land use for different activities ( e.g. Shops , Education, entertainment, offices e.tc.)
Things the students would need to do to plan for their traffic count
- Where / which roads to do the survey.
- Location of survey points / safe place / away from traffic lights.
- Measure distance from town centre.
- Which day / when to do the survey.
- What time(s) to do the survey.
- How long to record / count.
- How many surveys to do in one day
- How to organise themselves – e.g. one student on each side of the road / number of students in each group / assigning students to sites
- What equipment they would need – stopwatch, counters, clipboard, paper for recording
- Classification of traffic / what is traffic
- How to count and record / tally method
- Prepare tally chart
Reasons why tally method is suitable recording method
- Easy / quick method to do
- Allows accurate totaling after
Difficulties when doing traffic survey
- Being unable to count accurately at busy times/lots of traffic/traffic going too fast/too many lanes to count.
- Students losing concentration / bored / no break
- Breathing difficulties / breathing exhaust fumes
- Timings is hard to synchronise
- Specific weather difficulty – e.g. rain ruins paper / sunstroke
- Keep returning to do count / meet at different times
Traffic count question
A group of students was studying traffic flows in and out of the centre of a town.
A map of the area being studied is shown in Fig, below.
Number of vehicles at each site
The students wanted to investigate the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: The amount of traffic will be less further from the town centre.
Hypothesis 2: The amount of traffic going towards and going away from the town centre will change during the day.
What would be the students’ conclusion about
Hypothesis 1: The amount of traffic will be less further from the town centre?
Answer for hypothesis 1
Hypothesis 1 is incorrect / false
No clear pattern on the four roads
Two roads show less traffic further away from centre / Queens Rd. / Robertson Dr.
Two roads show more traffic further away from centre / Wellington Dr. / Cambridge Rd.
But difference in amount of traffic variation is small on all roads
To investigate Hypothesis 2: The amount of traffic going towards and going away
from the town centre will change during the day
Answer for hypothesis 2
Hypothesis 2 is correct / the amount of traffic going towards and going away from the town centre will change
More traffic going towards centre at 08.00 / morning
More traffic going away from centre at 17.00 / evening
Each road has the same pattern of movement
Ways to reduce traffic congestion in urban areas
Widen roads/more lanes/more roads/better roads
By-pass/ring road/underpass/flyover/bridge/tunnel/elevated road
Park and ride
Bus lanes/bike lanes
Car sharing
More public transport or example
Parking restrictions/more parking spaces
One way streets
Restrict traffic to certain days
Congestion charge
