Key Insights
- No federal accuracy standards exist for truck-specific AADT — a surprising gap given how critical commercial vehicle data is to bridge, pavement and freight planning.
- Published truck AADT error rates range from 41–96%. Altitude’s model achieves 27.3% for heavy-duty and 23.6% for medium-duty — the lowest on record at national scale.
- Altitude is the only commercially available product with segment-level estimates for Heavy, Medium, and Universal vehicle groups — covering approximately 10 million road segments, including hundreds of thousands with no official count..
- Three inputs power the model: observed GPS fleet data, contextual enrichment and HPMS ground truth — each essential, and more accurate together than any single source alone.
- Altitude’s AADT version delivers estimates within 90 days of year end, compared to the 12–24 month publication lag of traditional HPMS data.
When a project specifically involves truck and freight infrastructure, you need commercial vehicle Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) to support federal counts. Commercial vehicle AADT fills in details planners may miss — for example, on corridors where no cameras or even counters exist. Commercial AADT reveals whether those miles traveled are from passenger vehicles or Class 8 long-haul trucks.
This latest version of our model includes updates that better support planners with reliable commercial-vehicle data: Direct vehicle-class modeling, calibrated prediction intervals on every estimate and directional AADT ready in 90 days instead of 12–24 months. Tested and proven, here is how our model provides commercial AADT to support planning, grant applications and more.
Creating the commercial vehicle AADT model
Altitude by Geotab is the only commercially available AADT product that provides segment-level estimates for Heavy and Medium commercial vehicles alongside universal traffic, covering approximately 10 million road segments across all 50 U.S. states, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
Surprisingly, there really is no benchmark for truck-specific AADT from existing sources. For example, there are no Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) accuracy standards for vehicle-class-specific AADT. The existing AADT benchmarks apply exclusively to total traffic volume, not broken out by vehicle class, type or vocation.
Altitude fills that gap. Truck-specific AADT is critical for freight corridor planning, bridge loading assessments and pavement design. The latest version of Altitude’s commercial vehicle AADT model introduces four substantive advances over previous approaches.
- Medium and Heavy vehicles are now modeled directly from Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS) vehicle classification data, replacing the registration-ratio derivation used in earlier iterations — a change that grounds freight estimates in actual observed truck volumes rather than approximations.
- Time series forecasting now provides accurate data in three months, instead of 12–24 months from HMPS.
- Every estimate is now accompanied by confidence levels by road type and volume, so a high-confidence estimate on a major freight corridor is distinguishable from a lower-confidence estimate on a lightly traveled secondary road.
- Estimates are now disaggregated by direction of travel — inbound and outbound — supporting use cases that require directional flow data.
Altitude’s commercial vehicle AADT uses two complementary modeling approaches to create estimates across both observed and projected years.
Our model leverages volume and geospatial data from both the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and Geotab’s Altitude platform. Additional supporting data sources include census socioeconomic data, land use classifications and road network density features to enhance AADT modeling.
This model significantly improves data reliability, particularly on secondary roads where standard matching parameters produce poor alignment. This improvement in ground truth quality is the single largest accuracy driver in our data integration pipeline.
