Tuesday, December 01, 2015

2.6 miles of the A96 through Nairn - "Annual Average Daily Flow" of traffic 2000-2014

One of our regular readers points us in the direction of a Department of Transport site map that gives the Traffic Count points on a map of the Higland Region. That map is available here.  

Click on traffic point 784 on the map which is the 2.6 miles of road between the B9092 and the A939 junctions (the Ardersier and Grantown turn-offs respectively) and you will get yourself a spread sheet to download giving you traffic details between 2000 and 2014. The site says:

"AADF figures give the number of vehicles that will drive on that stretch of road on an average day of the year. For information on how AADFs are calculated, see the guidance on the Traffic Statistics pages on GOV.UK.

AADF figures are presented as: Units = vehicles per day"

So we downloaded the spreadsheet, took out a few columns of stats to try and fit it on a page, copied and pasted it and made it into the image below which if you click on you will see full size. 

Click to see full size image
So we wonder if any number crunchers out there in Gurnshire would like to have a look at that speradsheet themselves and see what they make of it. Obviously some days in summer would be a lot busier than those in winter (you would think) when it comes to average. Obviously the Department of Transport think these figures are useful because they publish them but perhaps some might have other ideas about the statistics. Does it look that the unofficial bypass via Auldearn and Cawdor has been taking the strain off the town in recent years for example given those figures?

UPDATE: We haver received some notes from a member of the Gurn think tank on these statistics and we will publish them in a separate article soon when time permits. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent to see this kind of data out there - bravo to the UK Government in this case.
Its a shame there is no counts around the outskirts of Nairn to see this "unofficial bypass" effect?

One thing is for sure looking at the stats 2005 showed a significant increase in all round traffic into Nairn (point 784) from 9446 to 12541 (30%) yet the count points just further up the road (towards Inverness) at Gollanfield (30789 and 10785) showed a more gentle increase.
Was 2005 a significant year for Nairn and its surrounding roads??

Given the 30% increase in traffic since 2005 have we had a 30% increase in road funding from the Highland council?

Anonymous said...

The number of vehicles on our roads hasn't decreased in recent years but the figures suggest that there is slightly less traffic going through the town than there was a couple of years ago. It's long being suggested that some traffic is using the back roads avoiding Nairn and these figures would seem to hold that to be true