The Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) requires traffic counts for many of its planning activities, including the ongoing development and maintenance of the agency’s travel-demand forecasting model. Currently, the vast majority of traffic counts that SEMCOG obtains are taken by the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT), the seven county road agencies in Southeast Michigan, the City of Detroit, and the Transportation Improvement Association (TIA), which coordinates the taking of counts for several communities in Oakland County. The county road agencies, City of Detroit, and TIA import their counts into a web-based software program called the Traffic Count Database System (TCDS).
SEMCOG is currently updating its travel-demand forecasting model. The updated model will have a base year of 2020, and SEMCOG will need traffic counts to help validate base-year runs of the model. Validation will require SEMCOG to obtain traffic counts above and beyond those available through TCDS. These counts will need to be collected at specific locations within and along the perimeter of the Southeast Michigan region. (The count locations situated along various “lines” within the interior of the region are called “cut-line locations,” and the locations situated along the periphery of the region are called “external-station locations.”) It is a requirement for model validation that all cut-line and external-station counts be taken by Spring 2021. In addition, SEMCOG is requesting counts for freight planning.
