098 I-495 (Washington, DC)
099 I-290 (New York)
102 I-97
104 I-495 (Delaware)
108 I-270 (Maryland)
109 I-295 (Maryland - District of Columbia)
113 I-395 (Baltimore, MD)
114 I-695 (District of Columbia)
116 DC295
116 I-595 (Maryland)
116 I-68
126 I-270Spr (Ashleigh, MD)
So does everyone on site live near DC or it's just a very popular place to visit?
I would argue that the answer is sort of both. Many of us live in the Mid-Atlantic or Northeast. The most highly attended road meets are in this area for a reason.
Good-ol' eastern seaboard. The most users, the densest population in the US, densest freeway network, and probably by extension the most places people are likely to travel to. Surely the highest AADTs and VMTs. With DC as a pretty central location, and a destination in its own right.
Worth noting that all those ConnectedRoutes enter a region the I-95 corridor is in, with only I-68 not being entirely in I-95 regions.
Interesting that GA I-95 is on there. All of the other top 10 segments are < 25 miles and GA I-95 is 114.18 miles. Also not in the same area as most of the others.
Interesting fact about the mileage; that's quite an outlier.
The ones that surprised me a little were the I-24 entries.
Then there's IL I-41, farther away from the east coast but a pretty easy clinch at 1.05 mi. It's also part of I-94.
Another interesting question to ask is what segment of highway have the most users been on, i.e. I-95 in DE between exits 2 and 4. I bet there is some location that beats out I-95/495 in DC.
This got some discussion in the past. I won't search for it
(could even be earlier in this thread? Maybe?), not having a good search term, but I do remember the most-traveled segment was somewhere on DE I-95. My first guess was between the PA border and the I-495 split (maybe it was at some point in the past?), but nope. Your answer is pretty close...
One way to check this with a program is to use the traveled format graphs and see which has the most travelers.
Thought of doing this as a shell script before deciding to again just query the DB -- though not everyone has a DB to query.
So here's a shell script anyway just for fun:
max=0
v=`head -n 2 tm-master-traveled.tmg | tail -n 1 | cut -f1 -d' '`
e=`head -n 2 tm-master-traveled.tmg | tail -n 1 | cut -f2 -d' '`
n=0
for line in `tail -n +$(expr $v + 3) tm-master-traveled.tmg | tr ' ' '%'`; do
echo -en "$n/$e\r"
t=0
code=`echo $line | cut -f4 -d%`
for c in `echo $code | sed -r 's~(.)~\1 ~g'`; do
case $c in
1) t=`expr $t + 1`;;
2) t=`expr $t + 1`;;
3) t=`expr $t + 2`;;
4) t=`expr $t + 1`;;
5) t=`expr $t + 2`;;
6) t=`expr $t + 2`;;
7) t=`expr $t + 3`;;
8) t=`expr $t + 1`;;
9) t=`expr $t + 2`;;
A) t=`expr $t + 2`;;
B) t=`expr $t + 3`;;
C) t=`expr $t + 2`;;
D) t=`expr $t + 3`;;
E) t=`expr $t + 3`;;
F) t=`expr $t + 4`;;
esac
done
if [ $max -le $t ]; then
max=$t
printf "$t: %s from %s to %s\n" \
`echo $line | cut -f3 -d'%'` \
`tail -n +$(expr $(echo $line | cut -f1 -d'%') + 3) tm-master-traveled.tmg | head -n 1 | cut -f1 -d' '` \
`tail -n +$(expr $(echo $line | cut -f2 -d'%') + 3) tm-master-traveled.tmg | head -n 1 | cut -f1 -d' '`
fi
n=`expr $n + 1`
done
This will take quite a long time to run.
But maybe more fun for those who want to search visually, load up mapview, switch to "Color by Traveler Count" and your legend at the lower left will show the highest number of travelers among the segments in the current view.
Ooh nice. I Color by Traveler Count pretty infrequently, and hadn't really paid attention to the legend. This is a good clue of what to look for.
Start in DC, enable "Always Update Visible Routes", scroll around up toward Philadelphia, ?, profit!
This will surely be more fun for the majority of people who aren't crazy into coding.
Unless I'm missing another, DE I-95 between exits 4A and 5A has 177 travelers. Haven't found more than that yet.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner! The DB says
DE I-95 4A 4B and
DE I-95 4B 5A () are tied for 1
st place.
Can't speak for others, but when I was a kid, my school district would send the 8th Graders on a multi-day field trip to Washington DC. There were fundraisers and parents would help foot the bill, teachers would accompany us as chaperones.
Thus my mileage around D.C.* was based on (attempting to) remembering the routing, and what was built, 30 (now 33) years ago.
I'd also need to reconstruct travels from when I was a small child; I visited DC around age 2. I could probably get away with marking I-95 down to I-695. South of there, no idea if I was on 95 or 295 or what.