Traffic Counts
At regular intervals, on an ongoing basis, Traffic Engineering personnel conduct counts of the traffic volumes on major City streets. This serves two general purposes:
- It gives us a good picture of the volume of traffic on any one street, obviously, at the time of the count.
- It gives us a broad sense of how much traffic Street A carries, relative to Streets B, C, and so on.
- Over time, it also allows us to draw conclusions about how traffic patterns are changing in the City.
Before looking at the most recent traffic counts, we recommend that you read the information below. Then you can view the counts of traffic volumes on a street-by-street basis, in one of two forms:
- an alphabetical listing, by roadway name (you can also search for particular roadways here), or
- a rank-ordered listing, by traffic volume.
The second form, in particular, can give you an idea of where the busiest streets are, and just how busy those streets are relative to others. (If you've lived and worked in Tallahassee for a while, you probably have a pretty good idea already!)
How to interpret the traffic counts
Although the order of the columns varies, both the alphabetic and rank-ordered listings provide the same types of information:
- Each row in one of the tables represents not just a roadway, but a section of a roadway. Particularly with long streets, this is important -- a section at one end or the middle might carry significantly more or less traffic than a section elsewhere.
- For each section, there are five columns of data (column order varies for the alphabetic and rank--ordered listings):
- Roadway name
- Date of count
- Section (in "START to END" form)
- The location where the count was taken. This simply indicates that the count was taken north of (abbreviated "n/o"), east of ("e/o"), south of ("s/o"), or west of ("w/o") the intersection between the roadway in question and some cross street in this section.
- The adjusted volume of traffic counted on that section on the indicated date.
- The "adjusted volume" appears here as a whole number. Note that the raw count of vehicles passing the count location is adjusted up or down depending on a number of factors, essentially to produce an average volume. This average "smoothes out the bumps" in volumes that occur, for example, during rush hours, school openings and closings, and so on.
- The date on which the count was taken may or may not be very significant. Generally, we try to schedule counts so they occur on "typical" days. Counting traffic in the area of a college football stadium on a fall Saturday, for instance, would not paint a typical picture of those streets' traffic loads. Bad weather can drive the counts on some roadways down quite a bit. Some sections may not have been counted at all, because construction delays there would completely skew the counts. (In the latter cases, the "Date of Count" column is blank.)
- Both the alphabetic and the rank-ordered indexes list 20 street segments per page. The rank-ordered listing, however, shows the counts in descending order. Thus, the first page in the rank-order listing shows you the 20 most heavily-traveled roadways; page 2, roadways number 21 through 40; and so on.
- Counts provided on these pages were accumulated for the most part in 2003 and 2004. An updated set of counts will be posted as soon as it becomes available.
You might also be interested in the most recent traffic count information (PDF) from the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), covering various roadways in Leon County (including some represented in our own counts). These counts are computed somewhat differently, so pay careful attention to the footnotes on each page. The report shows, for each street segment, annual average daily traffic (AADT); if you would like more information on the AADT itself, see the explanatory companion document (PDF) to the report itself.