Friday 29 January 2010

NCN Route 63 Traffic Counts




Heres a bit of a geeky blog...

I spent a cold and pretty dull 1/2 hour counting traffic at the cross roads that forms the junction of the the B582 and B585 just north of Nailstone (see map). If you remember (see previous blog post) these roads provided options for rerouting NCN 63 avoiding Battram Wood. I collected the data on a weekday morning (around 10am). I would like to repeat in the rush hour but I will need some help at it was a struggle to log each vehicles entry and exit from the junction. For any fellow geeks I have put the traffic flow below (doubled up to give an houly rate). I have numbered the roads (see map) to avoid confusion (I hope!)




I would draw the following conclusions:



  1. There seems to be a high percentage of lorries (18%) and as high as 25% on the B585 going north.


  2. The busiest road is the B585 going north - this is in fact the road that Route 63 takes further north when it emerges after Battram wood


  3. The east - west route along the B582 is more lightly loaded (this was identified as part of the black route in the previous post)

I having been trying to find standards for traffic flows for cycle routes, but have not been able to find any recommendations from Sustrans - I will ask Patrick. I did find some standards for the EuroVelo routes (long distance cross Europe cycle routes) which says: "Shared on-road routes should normally carry less than 1,000 vehicles per day and only in exceptional circumstances more than 3,000 vehicles per day".
I don't know how to convert an hourly daytime flow to a daily rate. I came up with a factor of 20 which sort of assumed very low night time flows, but more at rush hour. This would give daily flows of around 1000 - 1500 vehicles per day.

The single bike recorded wasn't me by the way!!

Heres the data ...




1 comment:

  1. Excellent work - am just trying to work out how to leave a comment so as to contribute in future!

    ReplyDelete