Analysis of Seasonal and Day-of-Week Traffic Patterns at National Parks

The National Park Service (NPS) is considering improvements to its traffic monitoring program in national parks. While several of the national parks within this network collect continuous vehicle data at multiple stations within each park, these continuous data have not been systematically analyzed for their suitability in factoring short-term traffic counts at other locations. Therefore, this research investigated seasonal and day-of-week traffic patterns using a sample set of five national parks, in the context of using these continuous data to factor short-term traffic counts. From the limited sample in this analysis, it was determined that the seasonal and day-of-week factors were not statistically different from 2002 to 2006 for all five national parks, allowing for adjustment of short counts to annual average daily traffic values. Therefore, the use of traditional traffic monitoring principles (e.g., use of a few continuous count locations with many short-term traffic counts that are factored to an annual average) can be considered. The NPS traffic monitoring system may also be enhanced with the use of data from nearby state highway counts. For the small number of parks examined in this research, there was a high correlation between park traffic and data from nearby (within 20 mi) state highway automatic traffic recorders.