Every listing flyer quotes a traffic count. Almost nobody explains what the number actually means. Kentucky traffic counts are free, public, and updated on a rolling basis by the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, and if you learn to read them properly you can check a broker’s claim in five minutes. Here is how we read them, with real 2025 numbers from our own corridors.
What Kentucky traffic counts actually measure
The headline figure is AADT, annual average daily traffic: the total vehicles passing a count station in both directions, averaged across a full year. Weekends, weather, and seasons are all baked in. KYTC publishes AADT for thousands of stations on its public traffic counts map, each tagged with the count year, and recounts stations on a rotating cycle. Always check the year. A 2020 count on a growing corridor is a different fact than a 2025 count.
The numbers behind the number
- Truck percentage. Stations record single-unit and combination truck shares. I-65 between the two parkways at Elizabethtown carried 70,103 vehicles a day in 2025 (station 047P68) with roughly 29 percent trucks. That is a freight artery. N Dixie Avenue at the Ring Road retail node carried 36,013 (station 047C05, 2025) with under 3 percent trucks. That is shoppers.
- K and D factors. K approximates the share of daily traffic in the design hour, D the directional split. Two roads with identical AADT can have very different rush-hour behavior.
- Segment definitions. Each count applies to a stretch between two cross streets. Pull the segment that actually touches your parcel, not the best number on the corridor.
Same highway, nine times the traffic
US 31W is one road with many markets. Through Radcliff, S Dixie Boulevard carried 26,354 vehicles a day at KY 144 (station 047D44, 2025). Down the same highway at Glendale, S Dixie Highway carried 3,093 (station 047254, 2025). Same route number, nine times the exposure. This is why corridor-level thinking beats route-level thinking, a point we hammer in the I-65 exit-by-exit guide and our Radcliff corridor guide.
Pass-through versus capture
High counts are only worth what you can capture. 70,000 vehicles on I-65 at 70 miles an hour buy nothing without an exit, which is why interchange pads price like gold and mid-segment frontage does not. A 15,000-count arterial with a signal, a median break, and easy ingress will outperform a 30,000-count divided highway where your customer cannot turn left. Traffic counts start the site conversation; access, signals, and medians finish it.
What counts cannot tell you
AADT says nothing about incomes, trade-area population, co-tenancy, or whether the traffic is going somewhere it already spends money. A count is one input in a site decision, alongside the demand fundamentals we cover in what serious land buyers actually look for.
Put the data to work
We pull station-level KYTC data on every site we evaluate and cite the station and year, so you are never trading on a stale flyer number. If you are weighing a purchase or a lease and want the corridor read, get in touch, or start with current commercial availability around Elizabethtown.
All figures: KYTC traffic count stations, cited by station number and count year. The data is public domain.