Traffic count
count of the number of people and/or vehicles passing through a space
A traffic count is a count of vehicular or pedestrian traffic, which is conducted along a street or road or at an intersection. A traffic count is commonly undertaken either automatically (with the installation of a temporary or permanent electronic traffic recording device), or manually by observers who visually count and record traffic on a hand-held electronic device or tally sheet. A count conducted at an intersection is called a turning movement count and separately records the different movements of people and vehicles through the intersection. Traffic counts are used by governments for many purposes such as providing warrants for specific infrastructure changes, prioritizing maintenance work, and as inputs to traffic demand models or other planning exercises. Traffic counts provide the source data used to calculate the Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT), a common indicator used to represent traffic volume. Traffic counts that include speeds are used in speed limit enforcement efforts, highlighting peak speeding periods to optimise speed-camera use and educational efforts.
Counting methods
Traffic counts can be obtained manually or automatically. Manual counts involve stationing a person (or persons) at a specific point by a road with instructions to count passing vehicles over a given period. This may involve differentiating by vehicle type. Automatic traffic counters can provide longer-term data, including more detailed information about vehicle type, but require ongoing maintenance and upkeep.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Traffic count” as count of the number of people and/or vehicles passing through a space. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as count of the number of people and/or vehicles passing through a space. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q361151. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Traffic count” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.