What is Average daily traffic (ADT)?

Average daily traffic (ADT) is like counting how many cars pass by your house every day on the street you live on.

Imagine you're sitting on your porch, and every time a car goes by, you drop a pebble into a jar. At the end of the day, you count all the pebbles in the jar, that number is average daily traffic for that street.

Now, if you do this every day for a whole year, you'd have a really good idea of how busy your street usually is. That’s what people who plan roads and cities do, they look at ADT to know where to build more lanes or maybe even a new road.

If a street has high ADT, like 10,000 cars every day, that means it's very busy. You might hear honking all the time and feel like you're stuck in traffic for hours. But if a street only has 500 cars passing by each day, it’s more like a quiet neighborhood road, perfect for playing catch or riding your bike.

So ADT helps people know how busy different streets are, just like counting pebbles on your porch tells you how many cars came by.