Contact: Brandon J. Callister, Lane County Traffic Engineering, 541-682-6934
Summer is here and so is road construction and vehicle counting.
Vehicle counts go hand-in-hand with road construction and planning. The amount of vehicle traffic present on a road can assist in determining what type of repairs will be performed and when the road is in need of improvements.
Lane County Traffic Engineering employees want the community to know these devices are an important tool to evaluating the health of our roadways.
“These are not ‘speed traps’,” said Brandon J. Callister, Lane County Traffic Engineering technical specialist. “They are a counting device that is critical to determining how much roads are used and what types of repairs will need to be planned for.”
Lane County Traffic Engineering asks for your safety and the safety of the traveling public, please do not attempt to remove or tamper with theses devices. It is important that these devices be left alone while deployed in the street until they are retrieved by Traffic Engineering personnel.
How It Works
A vehicle count location consists of a rubber tube affixed to the road across all lanes of travel and is connected to a metallic box vehicle counter mechanism. These boxes do no more than count the number of axle strikes which is then divided by the number of days that the counts were taken. That number is then multiplied by a seasonal adjustment factor based on the month of the year.
The result is an ADT or average daily traffic. This number, although not exact, is a rough representation of the amount of traffic using the road. These ADT numbers are then used to determine annual increases in road usage, growth factors, as well as in planning what, if any, road improvements will be performed. Roads that are counted include city streets, state highways, on and off ramps, as well as rural county roads. Within Lane County, major roads are counted annually, while most other rural roads are counted every four years.
Amber Fossen
Public Information Officer
Lane County Government
125 E. Eighth Ave.
Eugene, Oregon 97401
541.682.3718
541.359.9143 (cell)