Traffic flow variations in urban areas

Abstract

At the 1983 Annual Transport Convention (ATC, now called SATC), the author presented a paper with the same title as the one above. The paper provided typical hourly, daily, weekly and annual traffic count patterns in urban areas. Over the following 34 years the author has maintained records of traffic counts taken and has monitored and compared the typical variations with those produced in the original paper. It would appear from these that the underlying traffic flow patterns have remained much the same. In this paper the opportunity has been taken to completely revise and update the 1983 figures using a selection of urban freeway and arterial locations from the 2015 SANRAL Comprehensive Traffic Observations (CTO).