TMC "*.traffic" Data Archive Download Site

The data in this archive are continuously collected by the Traffic Management Center (TMC), a division of Mn/DOT, at a 30-second interval from over 4,000 loop detectors located around the Twin Cities Metro freeways, seven days a week and all year round. The collected data are then daily packaged into a single zip file and loaded into the UMD (University of Minnesota Duluth) ftp server from TMC. The file format follows "yyyymmdd.traffic" where yyyy is the four digit representing year, mm is the two digit representing month, and dd is the two digit representing date, for example, data for May 8, 2000 would have the file name "20000508.traffic". This file is a zip compressed format and can be uncompressed using common unzip software such as WinZip. Unzipping a "*.traffic" file will create about 8,000 files, in which 4,000 files are volume files with file name "###.v30" and the other 4,000 files are occupancy files with "###.o30" or "###.c30" where ### corresponds to the detector ID number. For details on the data format, click the link for the Mn/DOT unified traffic format provided below. This data service is provided by the Transportation Research Data Lab (TDRL), a division of NATSRL, at UMD to share the research resources and ideas with University researchers and Mn/DOT partners. The users of this data are encouraged to contact us and share research and development ideas. This data may be freely distributed, but should not be sold for profit. Last but not least, we (TDRL and external users) thank TMC for kindly providing this service to TDRL. The data format follows the Mn/DOT's Unified Traffic Data Format.

1. List of available *.traffic data. It creates a very large list and may take some time. The total data size is presently about 36G Bytes.If you need the complete set of data, we recommend to obtain the DVD disk set through TDRL DVD disk set .
2. Mn/DOT's unified traffic data format. Describes the *.traffic data format.
3. Detector Map. It shows detailed maps of detector locations using a main pdf file and its links (Courtesy of Mn/DOT).