Harmonised Traffic Counts

Explore time series of traffic volumes and trends in heavy vehicle traffic for selected Local Government Areas (LGAs) nationally.
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Introduction

Do you need to know which roads trucks are using or which parts of the country experience higher proportions of heavy vehicle traffic?

Traffic counts are collected by road managers for the purpose of monitoring the network. This information is compiled into a time series which highlights frequently used routes while also providing insight into the types of vehicles which rely on each road.

Date range: January 2008 – October 2023

The map below is a preview of the full interactive, displaying annual traffic counts at unique counter locations. Explore the data in more detail, including counts aggregated to LGA level, using the full visualisation.

About the data

Traffic counts information has been sourced from open data that state governments publish. The NFDH combines and standardises the information from each jurisdiction into our Harmonised Traffic Counts dataset. For more information on this dataset, or to access the full data via the NFDH API, please refer to the data catalogue.

For this interactive visualisation, the underlying traffic data has been summarised to report annual traffic counts by unique counter locations and aggregated to Local Government Areas (LGAs). LGA geometries are from 2023 and have been sourced from the ABS.

Users can click on either the map, list or table to explore traffic counts information, including a timeseries of heavy vehicles observed as a percentage of all traffic. The data can be useful to understand trends in traffic across the country, showing what areas of the road network are being most utilised by heavy vehicles.

Limitations

  1. Only counters which distinguish between light and heavy vehicles are included in the map.
  2. The 'Year' field represents the calendar year beginning in January for NSW, VIC, QLD and TAS data.
  3. The 'Year' field represents the financial year beginning in July for SA data.
  4. Only LGAs which have at least one counter in their vicinity are included in this dataset.
  5. While data is available for 2023, it should not be considered complete.
  6. Data is refreshed on an annual basis.

Please refer to the data catalogue for more information and limitations of the underlying Harmonised Traffic Counts dataset. 

Feedback

The NFDH is currently undertaking work to update our Harmonised Traffic Counts dataset. Please Contact the NFDH team if you would like to learn more, have any questions or suggestions for improving this interactive. All feedback is appreciated.