This research presents a step-by-step guideline for traffic data collection standards set by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). This study reviews manual and automatic methods of traffic counting and provides detailed information on traffic volume and vehicle classification studies. This research also provides a detailed analysis of the Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT)-TMC (Transportation Management Center) websites and compares it to selected Department of Transportation websites of other states such as Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Texas, and Virginia. The purpose of the comparison is to analyze the data sources; user friendliness, accessibility, types of data available, presentation formats, and style for each state to determine how they compared to DelDOT-TMC. Although there were some similarities, the findings suggest that two major differences are present. The overall results revealed that DelDOT-TMC provides limited traffic and roadway weather data, and presentation formats to the public as compared to the other states. Further, a unitless variable, called the Capacity Factor (Q), has been developed within this study to represent this relative comparison. This study shows that DelDOT TMC performs well within the group of selected states and better than selected states of similar size and most selected states of larger size; where only Virginia performs better then DelDOT TMC. DelDOT TMC does not perform as well as selected neighboring states; however, it performs in an acceptable range relative to neighboring states.
KeywordsTransportation Management CenterComparisonEvaluationData CollectionCase Study
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