By DAN SOKIL
dsokil@thereporteronline.com
LANSDALE - Drivers may have noticed something new crossing several of Lansdale’s streets last week: boxes connected to cords and chained to nearby street signs, with tubes running across the street.
Those boxes were there for a reason: each time you drive over the tubes you’re helping the Delaware Valley Planning Commission gather data on traffic counts throughout the borough.
"We are doing some traffic counting in Lansdale right now for PennDOT. It’s a cyclical count; all of the state roads have to be counted every few years," said Scott Brady, DVRPC’s manager of the Office of Travel Monitoring.
For two days last week, DVRPC traffic counters were in place on Seventh Street, Broad Street, Valley Forge Road, Vine Street, Susquehanna Avenue and Wood Street, all as part of PennDOT’s typical counting process.
The data from this week’s Lansdale study is already posted online at DVRPC.org , and the DVRPC official doing the collection has a local tie - field agent Joe Chiarolanza lives right here in the borough.
"I’ve done studies all around the nine counties on both sides of the river, but it’s been a while since I’ve been right here in my own backyard," said Chiarolanza.
These days, Chiarolanza’s focus has mostly been on collecting pedestrian and bicycle data using newer generations of collectors, and DVRPC can also collect data on Bluetooth devices that help calculate travel times and whether signal retiming is needed.
PennDOT assigns between 1,300 and 1,400 count locations in the five-county Philadelphia region each year, and DVRPC does those counts between April and October, then makes that data publicly available on its website DVRPC.org .
You can see traffic count data from previous Lansdale studies by going to DVRPC.org , clicking on Products and Services, then Traffic Counts - there, you’ll be able to see thousands of pink dots that each denote a count location, and use the interactive zoom and direction controls to find data from all of those points on the DVRPC map.
"If you click on a dot, it gives you the history of counts at those locations, and you can choose a report and hourly counts and go from there," Brady said.
For example, Valley Forge Road between Allentown Road and Mt. Vernon Street was surveyed in June 2000, and as any driver in the area can tell you, saw its peak traffic counts between 3 and 5 p.m. on both days it was surveyed.
Those three peak hours each saw more than 1,050 trips taken, with a steady dropoff over the rest of the evening and increase the next morning, with counts in the low 900s during the 7 to 9 a.m. rush and a spike at noon before a slight 1 p.m. decline leads into the next day’s rush-hour traffic.
The same stretch of street was surveyed in September 2005 and saw similar patterns: more than 1,020 trips taken each day between 3 and 5 p.m., with a slightly longer rush hour, but numbers in the high 900s during the 7 to 9 a.m. rush hour too.
Last week’s survey shows, you guessed it, even higher traffic counts: peaks between 1,040 and 1,125 trips during the 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. window, and counts well over 800 for the rest of the day between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.
DVRPC then takes that raw data and applies correction factors for the number of axles that hit the counters, converting the number of hits on those traffic tubes into the number of vehicles, and a correction for the season in which the study was done.
"Traffic tends to vary over the course of the year, so PennDOT has permanent count locations where they take counts every day all year, and the variance between any particular day and the average for 365 days is that correction factor," said Brady.
The counters for next year’s Lansdale streets might not be put down by Chiarolanza depending on how the personnel and street assignments shake out, but Brady said his office tries to cut down on travel time by assigning agents to place counters as close to their homes as possible.
"Then the planning people use the data that we collect, and try to make sense of it all," he said.
t www.DVRPC.org , click on ‘Products and Services,’ then ‘Traffic Counts’ and Traffic or Pedestrian Bicycle counts, then use the interactive map to find your location.
Follow Dan Sokil on Twitter at @dansokil
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