Traffic

Also available at other cadences:Hourly Weekly

How much traffic moves along a route segment over a period, for road, path, and corridor activity.

What does Traffic tell me?

Traffic estimates how much activity moves along a route segment, a road, a path, or a pedestrian corridor, during a period. It is the segment-level counterpart of Foot Traffic: instead of visits to a place, it measures throughput along a line.

Counts are estimates of movement along the segment, calibrated to real-world volume.

What questions does it answer?

How busy is this segment, and how does that vary by time of day and day of week?
Which routes carry the most traffic in an area?
How did throughput change after a closure, opening, or event?
How does one corridor compare to another?

Reading this cadence

This cadence shows within-day and day-of-week patterns and short-horizon changes.

How it's produced

Movement is attributed to the route segments it travels along and aggregated into a throughput estimate per segment and period.

How to read it

Throughput, not unique travellers. A traveller crossing a segment repeatedly is counted each time.
Compare comparable periods and cadences; low-volume segments are noisier.
Segment attributes (type, length, connectivity) are part of the segment metadata, not the traffic measure itself.

Foot Traffic, activity at places rather than along segments.

Country- and dataset-specific behaviour (coverage, geography units, exclusions, release timing) is documented on each dataset in its country catalog.

Schema

This is the standard schema for the metric. Always check the schema on the specific dataset you're using, since small variations may occur per country, map, or cadence. See the list of datasets using this metric below.

Map columns (e.g. ZIP code, state, brand, polygon) are usually exposed on each dataset as available columns that aren't included by default. They're not listed here because each dataset is connected to a different map and therefore has a different set of map columns available. Open a specific dataset below to see its full schema.

Column	Type	Description
way_id	STRING	Unique identifier of the route segment.
observation_start_datetime	DATE	Start of the observation period.
observation_end_datetime	DATE	End of the observation period.
direction	STRING	Direction of travel along the segment.
people_sum	INTEGER	Estimated throughput along the segment in the period.
way_created_date	DATE	Date the segment was added.
way_deleted_date	DATE	Date the segment was removed.