Talk:Key:traffic:hourly

Ambiguous value

Amount of car on a way in some period does not actually represent traffic jams on it. Imagine a road with traffic:hourly=10. Does it mean that there were a huge jam on it during this hour, or it mean the road is underused, so only 10 cars passed through it?
Value which is really useful is the average speed of vehicles during period, although actual traffic value also may be useful.
This tag was most likely supposed to be calculated automatically or obtained from government sources, so it does not seem that speed measurement will become something more difficult.
--Richard Try (talk) 10:34, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

The tag/format was thought to be the "what's easiest to survey", even if average speed might be more valuable for routing as such. Given the lane count, when the hourly traffic approaches I-don't-remember-exactly was it 1400 vehicles per lane, the capacity is full and traffic slows down. Given a road graph and enough traffic measurements at some pointd, one could simulate/guesstimate how much traffic there is on the other roads/ways without measurements. Alv (talk) 00:29, 25 February 2023 (UTC)