JB PARCELTraffic counts for retail sites: what AADT is, where it comes from, and what the chains require
Ask a retail site selector the first question they ask about a corner and it is the traffic count. Not the price, not the zoning. How many cars pass the site on an average day. The number has a name, AADT, and in Tennessee it is public.
What AADT is
Annual Average Daily Traffic is the total volume on a road segment over a year divided by 365, both directions combined. It smooths out weekends, holidays, and the week the school let out. The state Department of Transportation measures it with permanent counters on major routes and portable counters rotated around the rest of the system, usually on a three-year cycle, then publishes a count per station with the year it was taken.
Three things to know when you read one. The year matters: a 2019 count on a corridor that has added two subdivisions since is low. The location matters: the station may be a quarter mile from your corner, past an interchange, and the count at your driveway can be very different. And AADT counts cars, not customers; a highway with 40,000 vehicles at 65 miles an hour is worse for a coffee shop than a 22,000-count arterial with a signal.
What the chains publish
Most national operators publish their site criteria for brokers. These figures come from their own site-selection pages and packages and change over time, so treat them as the shape of the screen, not a rule.
| Operator | Traffic | Site |
|---|---|---|
| Wawa | 25,000 or more vehicles per day | About 1 acre or more, signalized corner |
| Chick-fil-A | 30,000 or more | 1.3 acres or more, signalized, full movement |
| 7-Eleven | 20,000 or more | Half acre or more, hard corner, about $50,000 household income |
| Starbucks | Daytime population and income weighted | Half to one acre, drive-through, $60,000 household income |
| Dollar General | Lower, often under 10,000 | About 1 acre, rural and small-town corridors |
| Aldi | 20,000 or more | 2.5 acres or more, about 100 feet of frontage |
Reading a corridor the way a selector does
- Count. Turn on the Traffic count layer. Each dot is a TDOT station with its AADT and year. Click it.
- Class. Turn on Road hierarchy. A principal arterial with a 25,000 count behaves differently from an interstate ramp with the same number. Arterials have driveways; interstates do not.
- Control. Turn on Traffic signals. A signalized corner is the difference between a pad and a parking lot for most quick-service concepts, because it gives the left-turn customer a way in.
- Side of the road. Morning coffee wants the going-to-work side. Evening grocery wants the going-home side. The count is the same; the revenue is not.
- Dirt. Now look at the parcel: acreage, zoning, who owns it, and how long they have. The absentee owner of a 1.2 acre commercial-zoned corner with a 28,000 count is the phone call.
Where the numbers come from in JB PARCEL
The Traffic count layer reads TDOT's published count stations directly, newest year per station. In the six counties where we have precomputed parcel centroids, the Advanced Search can filter parcels by the nearest station's count, so "commercial zoning, at least 20,000 vehicles a day, near a signal" is a search, not a research project. We are extending the centroid work to every Tennessee county now.
Turn on Traffic counts, Road hierarchy, and Traffic signals together, then filter by count in Advanced Search.
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