While not considered as part of the guidelines, the steps undertaken to date provide a good platform from which to review or establish the traffic count strategy. This is because firstly the links are established. This provides the optimum opportunity as there should be a maximum of one active count site per link. While the count site may not be frequently counted, any count will be used to inform the estimate for the carriageway sections within the link. So it is not beneficial to spend resource on another count site to duplicate the same information. If the counts are likely to be different then split the link.

Conversely, there may be good reasons to have more than one active site within a series of sections that could otherwise justify a single link. If so, then split the link to optimise the arrangement of carriageway sections to give one active count site per link.

Once the count strategy is in place, count sites can be assigned to their traffic groups. Note it is beneficial to set the count strategy such that there are enough counts to inform those sites with no valid count data for growth and traffic mix information.

The count strategy can be linked to the programme and used as a schedule to set the programme and flag overdue sites. This is a feature of the RAMM TCE tool.

Generally, the strategy is in place already but if starting from scratch, or undertaking a major review, it would sit here in the order. This should be established in accordance with the existing best practice guidelines around rotational and core sites.