Mapping U.S. Highway Intensity

Eric Fischer shares news of a new map project by Mapbox, which displays the latest Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS) national highway dataset on OpenStreetMap. What results is a highly readable map showing traffic intensity for roads all over the country, as measured by average vehicles per day.

Fischer provides a bit of background on the dataset used to populate the map: "The dataset has been open and available since the August, 2012 requirement for all states to annually report a measured spatial file of all public roads. The files available for download are limited to the highways that are part of the Federal Aid program (basically, local roads are not included)."

Fischer also assessed the final product as follows: "You can see that the geographical alignment between the two datasets is on par. The coverage of OpenStreetMap is better, but full road coverage is not the goal of HPMS. We've visualized the traffic density attribute in HPMS as line thickness to highlight the regional and national significance of different roads. Thicker yellow lines are more traffic and thinner yellow lines are less traffic. Zoom in to see the numbers for average vehicles per day."