Book Description
The Traffic Survey Unit (TSU) manages 40,000 traffic monitoring stations, of which 25,000 are updated annually. These counts obtained by TSU play a crucial role in allocation of resources for the maintenance, upgrade, and expansion of traffic infrastructure. The need for reliable, edited, and validated traffic count data is well acknowledged by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). The research reported here addressed this need by developing a statistically defensible approach to achieving spatial continuity of traffic counts as part of the editing and validation process. The deliverables include GIS-formatted data that programmatically identify PTC stations that have anomalous counts. We also provide information for creating traffic continuity maps. Identification of problem areas is quick and reduces the burden on NCDOT staff. As such, the project will significantly improve the process of validating traffic counts by increasing the accuracy of reported counts, by reducing the time delay between data collection and reporting, and by making it easy to provide customized reports of traffic counts to NCDOT departments and customers.
