Comprehensive and Spatially Detailed Passenger Vehicle and Truck Traffic Volume Data for the United States Estimated by Machine Learning

TL;DR

This paper develops a machine learning-based method to estimate missing truck traffic data across US roadways, creating a comprehensive, high-resolution dataset that enhances transportation and public health research.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of random forest regression to fill data gaps in truck traffic volumes, resulting in the most complete publicly available dataset of its kind.

Findings

Achieved coverage of 85.2% of US public roadways.

Produced validated high-resolution traffic density data.

Enhanced understanding of truck traffic's impact on air quality.

Abstract

The Highway Performance Monitoring System, managed by the Federal Highway Administration, provides data on average annual daily traffic volume across roadways in the United States, but it has limited representation of medium- and heavy-duty vehicle traffic on lower-volume roadways that are not part of the national highway system. This gap limits research and policy analysis on the community impacts of truck traffic, especially concerning air quality and public health. To address this, we use random forest regression to estimate medium- and heavy-duty vehicle traffic volumes on network links where these data are missing. The result is a comprehensive vehicle traffic dataset that covers 85.2% of public roadways in the United States. From these data, we also calculate traffic density values for each census block and vehicle class that can serve as a high-resolution surrogate for traffic-related air pollution exposure in public health studies and policy analysis. Our high-resolution spatial data products are rigorously validated and provide a more complete representation of truck traffic than any existing publicly available dataset. These datasets are valuable for transportation planning, public health research, and policy decisions aimed at understanding and mitigating the effects of truck traffic on communities that are disproportionately exposed to air pollution from vehicle traffic.