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Research Report 096 Traffic stream data, road categories, traffic counting strategies

Published: | Category: Integrated land use and transport systems , Research programme , Research & reports | Audience: General

The measurement of traffic volumes on an extensive nationwide road network is a very large task. It is not feasible to count all traffic on all roads all of the time.

Considerable reduction of effort in the counting process can be achieved by identifying key factors which may allow for grouping of roads into similar groups.

This project has determined ten major groups of roads by studying the hourly traffic patterns, over several yers. The primary analytical method was that of hierarchical cluster analysis on the daily flows. The base data was obtained from hourly traffic counts for the permanent telemetry sites on New Zealand state highways as well as continuous count data available from local urban traffic authorities.

Several strategies for estimating AADT using counting traffic flow volumes in selected periods were assessed for each of the ten groups. Comparison of the counting strategies is provided.

A table of scalar multipliers is provided for each week of the year, for each of the road categories.

Keywords: daily traffic patterns, classification, counting strategies, daily multiplier factors, weekly multiplier factors

Publication details

  • Author:
  • Published: 1997
  • Reference: 96