It’s counting season here at Traffic Data Inc. Every year just before school gets out we get a rush from different cities, counties and other engineering firms needing traffic data before patterns change for the summer.
Recently, a company contacted Traffic Data Inc. to help collect traffic data for their upcoming research project. Most of our traffic counts focus on daily volumes, turning movement counts, and/or gap studies. This study was unique in that our client was interested in documenting vehicle merging and weaving patterns at freeway interchanges. This presented a couple of unique challenges, including...
Tom Sachi from SRF Consulting Group was telling us about a big problem they had with their tube counters out at the Minneapolis St. Paul airport. The airport uses so much salt on the roads that SRF’s padlocks end up corroding/sticking and they couldn’t get them open this winter. They had to cut their chains to get the tube counters free.
Mark Ray, Crystal, Minnesota City Engineer and Public Works Director, put his COUNTcams to great use in educating his council members. He put together the video below to show how busy roads are during the p.m. peak hour with ADTs of 19,000 vehicles per day, 8,000 vpd, 700 vpd, and 100 vpd. Note – the videos are playing at 4x speed because most roads are painfully slow to watch at 1x speed.
Last summer, Traffic Data Inc. (TDI) was contacted about gathering traffic data near a warehouse in suburban Minneapolis. Construction was necessary behind the warehouse and the only access to the land was through the warehouse parking lot. Naturally, the warehouse owner was concerned about the impact of this new truck traffic on their existing traffic operations.
At Traffic Data Inc., we are frequently called on to do turning movement counts for local cities and developers. But recently, we were hired for a large data collection project on a county highway in southern Minnesota. What was unique for this project was the types of data we needed to collect:
