Traffic Counts in Western Mass: Is That House on a Busy Road?

The state counts traffic on 66,445 road segments across these 101 towns, from Interstate 91 through Springfield at 118,177 vehicles a day down to hill roads carrying a few dozen. If you are deciding whether a house is on a busy road, the number exists; this page is how to read it.

The distribution says what "busy" means here. The median counted segment in the region carries about 1,000 vehicles a day, and 50% of all counted segments carry under a thousand. Against that, a house on a road counted at five thousand is on a genuinely busy road for this region, whatever it would mean in a suburb of Boston, and a road at fifteen thousand is a main artery.

Every Town's Loudest Road

One row per town: the road with the highest count inside it. In Monroe, the busiest counted road in the entire town, Turner Hill Road, carries 350 vehicles a day, which is to say that the town's loudest road is quieter than a supermarket car park. Thirty miles away, Springfield's busiest segment carries 118,177.

Checking One Address

The busiest road in town is rarely the road you are pricing. For a specific house, the check runs the address, finds the counted segments around it and reads their figures, which is one of the point checks the address lookup runs. A count on the road itself beats any impression from one afternoon visit: traffic has a schedule, and a road that is quiet at Sunday viewing time can carry its five thousand on weekday mornings.

What This Does Not Mean

Not every street is counted. The inventory covers the state system and locally counted roads, so a quiet lane with no row in the data is uncounted, not zero, and the busiest road shown for a rural town may simply be its only counted one. Counts also age on a rolling cycle; each row above carries its own year, and a segment counted before a mill closed or a bridge shut describes traffic that may have moved.

And a count is volume, not noise or danger: a road at three thousand with a stop sign and sidewalks lives differently from the same three thousand at highway speed past the front door. The number tells you which question to ask at the viewing, which is what a figure on a map is for.