How Advanced Traffic Counts are Powering Better Business Decisions

Understanding traffic patterns is critical when choosing a store location, designing automotive products, or analyzing property values. Now, businesses can get the most up-to-date traffic counts on 2.5x more roads to drive more profitable decisions.

For many businesses, transportation intelligence is critical to making the right decisions. The number of vehicles and pedestrians on a given road — and how they move throughout a region — can dramatically impact how many visits a store gets, where drivers need to fuel up, or if EVs need to charge.

But historically, commercial decisionmakers have had to rely on incomplete and outdated traffic counts for information on where and how potential customers drive.

Now, StreetLight offers Advanced Traffic Counts to inform real estate decisions and products for professionals across industries like:

Commercial real estate
Retail and restaurants
Software
Electric vehicles
New mobility

These counts are updated frequently and cover millions of road segments across the U.S. and Canada, so you can make confident decisions based on the most comprehensive, up-to-date information on travel patterns.

StreetLight Advanced Traffic Counts is designed specifically for the commercial sector, to understand how potential customers move so you can choose the right street corner for a new store, select EV charger locations based on nearby traffic patterns, or develop new products and services based on real customer travel behaviors.

Here’s how it works.

StreetLight Advanced Traffic Counts offer pre-processed traffic volumes for over 25 million road segments, totaling over five million miles in the U.S. and Canada including motorways and trunk roads, arterials, and on/off ramps for comprehensive coverage. But it doesn’t end with traffic volumes. This data can be further contextualized with additional details like trip characteristics and historical demographics so you can make much more nuanced business decisions.

StreetLight Advanced Traffic Counts offer pre-processed traffic volumes for over 25 million road segments, totaling over five million miles in the U.S. and Canada including motorways and trunk roads, arterials, on/off ramps, and residential streets for comprehensive coverage.

coverage of advanced traffic counts in Chicago, Illinois

A visualization of traffic counts in the broader Chicago metropolitan area. StreetLight’s extensive coverage provides traffic counts for millions of road segments, enabling more granular location intelligence to power the most profitable business decisions.

This means that as you begin to identify the next corner for your coffee shop, convenience store, or electric vehicle (EV) charger location, you can take into consideration factors like vehicle traffic, trip purpose (e.g. home-to-office vs. non-commute trips), and the overall demographics (e.g. income, education, family status, and more) of travelers passing by your potential location.

Likewise, these same factors can inform portfolio management for existing commercial real estate locations, diagnosing why some locations perform better than others, and where certain locations should be closed, where open hours should be extended or shortened, or where downsizing or expansion would help maximize overall revenue.

Market research firms and consultancies also benefit from these same insights when advising clients on commercial real estate decisions.

visualization of traffic counts in Chicago, zoomed in

A zoomed-in view of Chicago traffic counts highlights roadways with the most trips (seen in dark red) and the least trips (in yellow).

How StreetLight’s Traffic Counts Support Better Site Selection and Operations

Because of the extensive coverage of our traffic counts, and the ability to filter counts by time of day and day of week in the relevant month or year, retailers, real estate professionals, investors, and other customers can now more easily identify promising store locations along nearly any roadway in the U.S. or Canada.

Importantly, businesses that rely on foot traffic (such as retail and restaurants) can also view historical pedestrian traffic counts to understand where high foot traffic will translate into more sales, while businesses that rarely benefit from foot traffic (such as car washes) can narrow their focus to vehicle traffic counts exclusively.

Importantly, businesses that rely on foot traffic (such as retail and restaurants) can also view historical pedestrian traffic counts to understand where high foot traffic will translate into more sales, while businesses that rarely benefit from foot traffic (such as car washes) can narrow their focus to vehicle traffic counts exclusively.

These same insights can also be used to forecast sales at new and existing stores. Portfolio managers can now understand where traffic is most likely to drive store visits and sales. Using traffic counts by time of day and day of week, they can also determine if store hours or staff operations should be shifted to capture demand when it is highest.

Trip and Traveler Attributes Help Determine Where Demand is High

Traffic counts are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to site selection, research and development, and more. That’s why StreetLight Advanced Traffic Counts also include trip speeds, trip distance, and historical trip purposes and traveler demographics to further inform important decisions impacting your business.

Visualization of traffic volume with trip and traveler characteristics for two locations

For example, a commercial real estate professional evaluating potential locations for a new coffee shop could zero in on road segments that morning commuters take on their way to the office. Similarly, someone looking to open up a new location for a budget-friendly grocery store chain could pinpoint road segments that are frequently used by travelers with lower household incomes.

Likewise, adding the context of trip characteristics can further inform commercial real estate decisions. For example, traffic volume may not tell the full story for brands who rely on drivers traveling slowly enough to read their signage and turn into their location.

Luckily, with StreetLight Advanced Traffic Counts, these customers can take trip characteristics like speed into consideration to ensure the traffic at the site they select isn’t speeding by too quickly to bring in business.

Likewise, trip characteristics like direction of travel can inform which street corner or side of the road is most advantageous for a new store.

Ensuring Reliable Data for Confident Business Decisions

We’ve already discussed how StreetLight Advanced Traffic Counts allow commercial customers to access recent and historical data for a full-picture view of mobility patterns impacting their business. But how reliable are the metrics we provide?

Our data validation processes for StreetLight Advanced Traffic Counts follow the same trusted methodology used for StreetLight InSight®, the most-adopted big data platform for transportation. Metrics are validated against permanent traffic counters and by transportation industry professionals.

Every month, we ingest, index, and process vast amounts of location data from connected devices and the Internet of Things, then add context from numerous other sources like parcel data and digital road network data to develop a view into North America’s vast network of roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks.

This data is then delivered in bulk through either a data file (such as a CSV) or via API, to integrate seamlessly into your existing data analysis platforms.

To understand how your customers move and get more information on the travel patterns impacting your business, click the banner below to get started.