The Department for Transport publishes annual and quarterly estimates of road traffic on Great Britain's roads. The methodology used to produce these estimates was last reviewed in a 2007 National Statistics Quality Review. Since then, new data sources have become available (such as mileage data from MOT tests), more use has been made of vide o traffic counting methods, DfT has conducted a review of uses and users of traffic statistics, and further IT improvements have been made to the statistical processing systems. As a result, it is believed that there is potential to deliver innovation and greater value for money when estimating road traffic in Great Britain. However, the key challenge is to do this while ensuring robust estimates continue to be produced that meet user needs. The review covers a number of areas, split into two topics, as set out below. Methodology: How the road samples are stratified. Imputation methods. Quarterly traffic estimation methods. Annual traffic estimation methods. Alternative data sources: Alternative methods of performing short-term road-side traffic counts. Use of non-road-side data sources, such as GPS data and MOT data. Exploring opportunities for entering data sharing agreements with organisations that collect traffic data and how these could be integrated with DfT's data sources. This document will provide an overview of the projects above, their progress to date and their conclusions if complete. Comprehensive reports including detail on statistical methods and analyses will be published online alongside this document as the projects are completed. This report will be updated once the projects within the review have been completed. Any proposals for changes to the Road Traffic Statistics publication and datasets will be subject to a consultation process at the end of this project. (Author/publisher)
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