Organize traffic counts
Traffic is a major source of air pollution. By organizing traffic counts and linking the results to local air quality, you make people aware of the relationship between traffic and air quality.
You tackle the following challenges:
That's how you do it
Traffic counts give an idea of the traffic flows in a particular street. There are different techniques for that.
- Count manually with a counting tool such as a clicker or paper counting form. You register the passing traffic participants and distinguish between the different categories: cars, pedestrians, cyclists… This method is of course limited in time, eg one hour during rush hour.
- Register traffic fully automatically with Telraam. So you don't have to do anything yourself, except attach the device to the inside of a window with a view of the street. This way you can perform counts for a longer period of time.
- A municipality can roll out a measurement campaign with counting loops or counting hoses. This makes it possible to estimate how many cyclists, cars and trucks pass on certain roads, in which direction and at what speed.
Tips
- The Flemish government makes its traffic data available via an open data portal . This makes the current traffic data of their measuring loops available to everyone.
- The Dutch government also makes its data freely available. You can find that data here .
Knowing more
Straatvinken is a citizen science project with an annual joint counting moment to check how healthy the traffic is on our streets. During the counting moment, citizens record for one hour how much and which traffic passes in their street. In this way one can check whether traffic is evolving towards a sustainable modal split : "less car traffic and more sustainable mobility".
More information
- Street finches (Flanders)
- Abacus (Flanders)
- Traffic monitoring by means of visual traffic counts (Flanders)
- Traffic center (Flanders)
- Data register (the Netherlands)
- Measuring together Utrecht (RIVM, the Netherlands)
