N American toll traffic level with a year ago - TOLLROADSnews SURVEY

Toll traffic December through February seems on average to have been holding at about the same level as a year ago. We got toll transaction numbers from 15 toll authorities. Overall the February quarter this year has been level pegging with the same three months last year.

Normal annual growth is in the 1 to 1.5 percent range, so toll traffic is showing signs of weakness from the high fuel prices, and the apparent beginnings of an economic recession.

But overall the numbers aren't at all dramatic.

To three decimal places the February quarter (Feb, Jan, Dec) of 2008 is the same as the February quarter of 2007: 1.000. To 4 decimal places it is 0.9996.

The results vary of course. The most dramatic decline is traffic is at the 91 Express Lanes in California - a decline of almost 12%. In January and February traffic is down 13.5%.

Florida's Turnpike traffic is down quite strikingly also - by 6.5%.

The Dulles Greenway is down nearly 5% for the quarter though February shows a recovery.

Traffic NY-NJ via the Port Authority bridges and tunnels is down 1.1% for the Feb Q this year vs Feb Q last year. February the month was down 2.1%.

The Golden Gate Bridge was very weak in January but December and February were level pegging with last year. The Bay Area bridges are down 2.7% on a year ago for the quarter, with special weakness in January also.

Deleaped data

That's a feature of the numbers totaled too. December and January were down on the same months a year earlier but February is up 1.8%. We deleaped. We'd already multiplied all February 2008 data by 28/29 to correct for the leap year month. So we have discounted for the extra day before reaching the 1.8% increase.

Dallas is booming, apparently unaffected by any recession. The NTTA there was our strongest performer - up 8%. By contrast Harris County (Houston) is just up a tad over last year - 1.1%.

Kansas Turnpike is similar.

The Ohio Turnpike is down but not by much -0.9% for the quarter.

The second strongest performer is E470 in Denver Colorado which is up 3% in the Feb quarter this year vs last.

407ETR in Toronto is up 2% for the quarter.

DATA: Where a new tolling point opened during the year we tried to get data excluding the transactions at that toll point so were were comparing the same toll network. And we applied 28/29 to the leap February data this year.

Beyond that we made no attempt to adjust the data. So some declines, or slower growth may be attributable to toll increases or different weather, or different distribution of weekends through the month.

A big problem with same period year-ago comparisons is that they are just as likely to be measuring a peculiar issue a year ago rather than telling us much about this year.

Recalling a class in statistical method, ideally to measure trend we'd have seasonally adjusted data and perhaps a weekly moving average. In the absence of seasonally adjusted weekly data we go with what's available - month-on-same-month-a-year-back.

The aggregate data is simply a summing of all the monthly transaction numbers. That tends to overweight the transaction-intensive low rate tollers like Orlando with many mainline toll points as compared to trip toll (ticket) systems and bridges.

UPDATES: We've asked a number of other toll authorities for data and it hasn't arrived. If it comes in we'll enter it into our spreadsheet and update this.

SEMANTICS: Don't feel bad about not having heard of the verb 'deleap'. We just made it up.

TOLLROADSnews 2008-03-28

UPDATE: The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority which operates the major toll crossings of New York City has only preliminary February and January numbers for now, and doesn't release those. In the recent December however traffic was 24, 435k vs 25,531k for December 2006. That's a 4.29% drop. 

We haven't added the TBTA numbers to our spreadsheet but clearly those numbers would lower the average for all toll agencies which without TBTA was about 1% down.

TOLLROADSnews 2008-04-01