Creating A National Nonmotorized Traffic Count Archive: Process And Progress

Robust bicycle and pedestrian data on a national scale would help promote effective planning and engineering of walking and bicycling facilities, build the evidence-based case for funding such projects, and dispel notions that walking and cycling are not occurring. To organize and promote the collection of nonmotorized traffic data, a team of transportation professionals and computer scientists is creating a national bicycle and pedestrian count archive. This archive will enable data sharing by centralizing continuous and short-duration traffic counts in a publicly available online archive. Although other archives exist, this will be the first archive that will be national in scope and enable data to be uploaded directly to the site. This archive will include online input, data quality evaluation, data visualization functions, and the ability to download user-specified data and exchange the data with other archives and applications. This paper details the first steps in creating the archive: (a) review count types, standard formats, and existing online archives; (b) list primary functional requirements; (c) design archive architecture; and (d) develop archive data structure. The archive's versatile data structure allows for both mobile counters and validation counts of the same traffic flow, an innovation in design that greatly expands the usefulness of the archive.