Check for Busy Street When Buying a House
- Adam Garrett
- Sep 30, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: May 1
Residential properties on busy streets are typically a negative on resale and the homeowner unless the new owner is looking to also use that home for commercial purposes and is willing/able to advertise that business with a sign on the premises. Even if the home itself is on a short culdesac, if a nearby road is busy, in some cases, you may get woken up by sirens in the night if you're a light sleeper, your home doesn't have good sound-proofing, and you don't use anything to dampen noise.
Here I'd like to go over how you can identify the issue before visiting a property or while considering an offer if it's an important one to you.
The Best Place to Go to Find a Map of Busy Streets in VA
In VA, the DOT has a solid resource for checking out traffic volume in a user-friendly fashion. Like in many cases of research for a home, I typically recommend using the desktop view on a laptop or desktop on a large screen rather than a phone.
Step 1
Option A: As long as this link keeps working, here is how to go there directly.
Option B: In the event the above link doesn't keep working, here it is. Once you go to that link, there are a few extra steps. Click the \/ in the top right, then Open in Map Viewer Classic.
Step 2
Input the address of whatever property you're considering, then hit enter or click on the magnifying glass. You'll notice that the home is not even on a ranked street, meaning it has very low traffic volume, but that an adjacent street is ranked, though still relatively low traffic.
It's important to note that sometimes unranked streets may be merely due to missing information. For instance, with the neighborhood on the right, they are in York County, while the others are in Newport News, & you can see that York County appears to have input details that Newport News did not in this case:
Because of disparity like that, it's a good idea to zoom out some, & in some cases, you may even want to check for other resources. Doing less than 3 minutes of digging, I found this more detailed list that gives me daily traffic count for Kiln Creek Parkway by year. Also, a brand new development may not have been present at the time of the publication of any given map.
The Best Place to Go to Find a Map of Speed Limits
Go to a state map.
If in VA, go to this speed limit map of VA.
If outside of VA, do a Google Search, i.e. speed limit map virginia
If the speed of a specific street isn't listed on there, go to Google Maps street-view to see if you can check that way.
The Best Place to Go to Find a Spreadsheet of Busy Streets in VA
While the file types are a pain to deal with, you can download a zipped file with hundreds of cities/counties/towns separate spreadsheets here for VA at the Department of Transportation website:
The Best Place to Go to Find Busy Streets in Other States
If looking in another state, the best place to go, in my opinion, is Google, then search for the terms (inputting whatever state in place of North Carolina if looking elsewhere):
north carolina traffic volume map department of transportation
After clicking on the first website that comes up on that Google search, that link has a link within that page for "Interactive Traffic Volume Map"
It won't always be that easy/user-friendly to find, but it's worth the effort to find the best option for your state/county if traffic count is very important to you.
The Best Place to Go to Find Street Views & other imagery (i.e. noise barriers for interstate traffic near homes)
To check for things like sound barriers, the 3d mode or the street view of Google Maps can show that very readily in a relatively well-populated area, i.e.:
Aerial view:
Street view in the same location (keep zooming in to get it):
3D View around the same location (from a desktop, hold down control while dragging with your mouse to adjust the view, with zooming options also available):
The Best Place to Go to Find Current Traffic
Google Maps has a busy streets option, though keep in mind that it points out actual traffic (i.e a traffic jam) & doesn’t share actual traffic count.
Related:
Loosely Related:
Comments