The City of Toronto's Transportation Services Division collects short-term traffic count data across the City on an ad-hoc basis to support a variety of safety initiatives and projects.
The data available in this repository are a full collection of Turning Movement Counts (TMC) conducted across the City since 1984.
The two most common types of short-term traffic counts are Turning Movement Counts and Speed / Volume / Classification Counts.
Speed / Volume / Classification Count data, comprised of vehicle speeds and volumes broken down by vehicle type, can be found here.
Turning Movement Counts include the movements of motor vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians through intersections. Counts are captured using video technology. Older counts were conducted manually by field staff.
The City of Toronto uses this data to inform signal timing and infrastructure design.
Each Turning Movement Count is comprised of data collected over 8 non-continuous hours (before September 2023) or over a continuous 14-hour period (September 2023 and after), at a single location. Some key notes about these counts include:
- Motor vehicle volumes are available for movements through the intersection (left-turn, right-turn and through-movement for each leg of the intersection).
- Motor vehicle volumes are further broken down by vehicle type (car, truck, bus).
- Total bicycle volumes approaching the intersection from each direction are available.
- Total pedestrian volumes crossing each leg of the intersection are available.
- Raw data are recorded and aggregated into 15-minute intervals.
The following files showing different views of the data are available:
- Data Dictionary (tmc_data_dictionary.xlsx): Provides a detailed definition of every data field in all files.
- Summary Data (tmc_summary_data): Provides metadata about every TMC available, including information about the count location and count date, as well as summary data about each count (total 8- or 14-hour pedestrian volumes, total 8- or 14-hour vehicle and bicycle volumes for each approach to the intersection, percent of total that are heavy vehicles and a.m. and p.m. peak hour vehicle and bicycle volumes).
- Most Recent Count Data (tmc_most_recent_summary_data): Provides metadata about the most recent TMC available at each location for which a TMC exists, including information about the count location and count date, as well as the summary data provided in the “Summary Data” file (see above).
- Raw Data (tmc_raw_data_yyyy_yyyy): These files—grouped by 5-10 year interval—provide count volumes for cars, trucks, buses, cyclists and pedestrians in 15-minute intervals, for movements through the intersection, for every TMC available. Vehicle volumes are broken down by movement through the intersection (left-turn, right-turn and through-movement, for each approach), cyclist volumes are broken down by leg they enter the intersection and pedestrian volumes are broken down by the leg of the intersection they are counted crossing.
This dataset references the City of Toronto's Street Centreline dataset, Intersection File dataset and Street Traffic Signal dataset.