With their low cost and relatively quick installation, pneumatic road tubes have long been the go-to standard for collecting volume-based traffic data. However, in recent years, we’ve seen cities steadily adopting safer, more efficient methods of traffic data collection, namely video.
The US Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) released their annual Urban Congestion Trends for 2010, which shows an increase in congestion and traffic levels overall within US urban cities. Twenty cities are measured annually and the latest report shows an 18 minute increase in daily delays from 4:20 to 4:38. Congestion levels have been steadily increasing since 2008 when levels dropped due to the downturn in the economy. However, they haven’t reached the levels previously seen prior to the recession in 2007.