The Impact of Cold and Snow on Weekday and Weekend Highway Total and Passenger Cars Traffic Volumes

Abstract

Presented in this paper is an investigation of the impact of cold and snow on daily traffic volumes of total traffic and passenger cars. It is based on a detailed case study of five years of Weigh-In-Motion data recorded continuously at a highway site in Alberta, Canada. Dummy-variable regression models are used to relate daily traffic volumes with snowfall and categorized cold variables. The importance of all the independent variables used in the model are established by conducting tests of statistical significance. The total traffic and passenger car volumes are influenced by both the snowfall and the cold categories. Plots of the partial effect of each independent variable on the dependent variable are generated. It is found that a daily snowfall of 10 cm may cause a 25% reduction in the daily volume of passenger cars, and temperatures below -25 °C may reduce the passenger car volumes by 10% or more. It is believed that the developed traffic-weather models of this study can benefit highway agencies in developing more advanced imputation method or identifying weather adjustment factors for accurate estimation of AADT from short duration traffic counts.