Background:
I work for a municipality in Canada that has:
- ~800km of roads (mixture of urban and rural)
- The roads are split at street intersections, meaning we have 5,000+ GIS road lines.
Our traffic department does limited traffic count studies each year. They generally only do traffic counts for roads where there is an issue, such as a resident complaining about above-average traffic.
Requirement/Question:
We want to refine our road deterioration curves (the equation we use to predict future road condition) by using improved traffic data. In the past, we've used the traffic counts from our traffic department. But the data is too limited and tends to only exist for roads with higher-than-average traffic, which is not ideal for proper statistical analysis.
Instead, we want traffic counts for ALL 5,000 road segments. But that quantity isn't practical using traditional traffic counting techniques, even spread out over a few years.
What are the options for getting traffic counts for ALL roads in a road network? For example, are there any Canadian commercial products that produce accurate traffic counts using cell phone data or other large-scale data-collecting methods?
For anyone who has gone through a similar process, can you share any tips/lessons learned?
Thanks.
