Interpretation

This indicator shows the Annual Average Daily Flow (AADF) which measures the average number of vehicles per mile of road on a typical day, in Great Britain.

The units for this measure are number of vehicles and figures are presented rounded to nearest hundred.

The calculation for the average daily flow is estimated by dividing the annual traffic estimate by the road length and the number of days in the year.

This measure includes motor vehicle traffic on all publicly maintained highways, covering both centrally and locally managed roads.

While road traffic estimates are robust at higher levels of aggregation, local authority splits and temporal distributions are less robust, reflecting limitations in sample size and coverage. These datasets are therefore labelled as Official Statistics to reflect this.

Further information on definitions and methodology, along with information on data quality and robustness, is available in the Department for Transport Background Quality Report.

Department for Transport also publish road length statistics by local authority. Together with AADFs, these allow users to see both how busy roads are within an area and the overall size of the road network.

Get the data

You can download this dataset in an XLSX, CSV or CSVW format, or download all available datasets in an XLSX or JSON-Stat format.

The original source data for this indicator can be found on the following page: Department for Transport(opens in a new tab).

Information on the strengths and limitations of the Explore Local Statistics service and methods used is available in the quality and methodology information (QMI) report.

Other indicators

Motor vehicle flow is one of 106 local indicators on the Explore local statistics service. See the full list of local indicators.