Measuring the number and proportion of people living near busy roads is one way to estimate and compare traffic exposure across communities. These data measure traffic exposure for Minnesotans living within 300 meters (m) of busy roads, where air pollution from motor vehicle traffic is highest. Busy roads are defined as any road segment with annualized average daily traffic greater than 10,000 vehicles.

Population estimates are derived from land area near busy roads, so may not be exact. For this reason, we do not estimate the number of residents living within 300 m of busy roads for census tracts, the smallest geographic unit for which data were analyzed.

Because census tracts can overlap multiple zip codes, we assigned primary zip code related to each census tract based on the largest geographic overlap, i.e. the zip code in which the largest area of a given census tract falls was assigned.

To learn more about how these measures were calculated see About the traffic data.

Data sources:

Roadway and traffic data are from the MN Department of Transportation Traffic Forecasting & Analysis traffic volume data (1997-2017).

Population and poverty data are from US Census Bureau American Community Survey 2013-2017 5-year tract-level estimates, via American Fact Finder. Data are calculated for 2010 census tract geography.