The Traffic Monitoring Practices Guide for Canadian Provinces and Municipalities provides the first national-level guidance on the planning, design, and implementation of traffic monitoring programs for Canadian provinces and municipalities. The Guide will assist agencies with upgrading their traffic monitoring programs and may ultimately culminate in more consistent, nationally relevant guidance for monitoring traffic.
Traffic monitoring programs and data are critical for helping transportation agencies efficiently allocate resources, effectively operate the transportation system, and strategically plan for the future. Provincial and municipal transportation agencies implement traffic monitoring programs to provide information to support transportation planning, engineering, and management.
The primary objectives of the Guide, authored in part by TRAC researchers, are to promote uniformity in the approach and techniques used to deliver traffic monitoring programs in Canada and to improve the quality of the traffic data provided by those programs.
In Canada, a guide of best practices for traffic monitoring from the Canadian perspective was needed. As analytical methods and technologies have improved to enable more comprehensive monitoring capabilities, the need has grown for consistent, reliable, and increasingly detailed traffic information to support a wide range of transportation decisions. The need has also grown to integrate data from a variety of sources, including traditional traffic monitoring technologies, on-board monitoring technologies, traffic sensors, and manual surveys. The breadth of transportation analyses and decision-making undertaken by transportation agencies requires more detailed information about truck movements and the travel patterns of active transportation users, particularly non-motorized modes. Finally, traffic data are fundamental parameters required by performance measurement programs to guide decisions and promote responsibility and accountability, and insofar as performance indicators are used for comparisons among provincial and municipal jurisdictions, consistency and transparency in the methods used to generate traffic information are increasingly important.
The scope of the Guide encompasses all functions within a traffic monitoring program, namely, program design and evaluation, data collection, data analysis, and reporting of traffic data. Separate guidance is provided for motorized and non-motorized modes. The Guide also addresses the unique issues and challenges associated with monitoring congested conditions. It is intended for use by transportation professionals involved in the planning, design, implementation, and management of traffic monitoring programs, as well as those whose responsibilities involve the application of traffic data, for provincial and municipal agencies in Canada.
Access to the Guide (Transportation Association of Canada)
Authors:
Jonathan D. Regehr
Rob Poapst
Garreth Rempei
Jeannette Montufar
MORR Transportation Consulting Ltd.
Mark Hallenbeck, Washington State Transportation Center-UW
Sponsor: Transportation Association of Canada
August 2017