Evaluation of Video Detection System as a Traffic Data Collection Method

Traffic counts are one of the fundamental data sources for a variety of transportation applications ranging from assessment of current transportation system conditions to future transportation planning and forecasting.  A variety of traffic data collection methods have been used to provide continuous traffic count coverage at selected locations to estimate annual average daily traffic. This paper evaluated the performance of Video Detection System.Video Detection System was investigated under various conditions including mounting styles, heights, and roadway offsets.  This paper conducted a lane-by-lane analysis and the results indicated that Video Detection System data present reasonably accurate data, although these data exhibit more variability compared to Automatic Traffic Recorder data.  The paper provides an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the Video Detection System technology based data as compared to the Automatic Traffic Recorder data and helps in the decision process of whether to use the data for specific transportation planning and strategic decision applications.