Evaluating mobility improvements in a busy tourist town

The beautiful town of Wolfville in Nova Scotia, Canada, only has around 5000 full time residents, but also hosts 3000-4000 students during term time, and also enjoys a great influx of tourists to its wineries, restaurants and other facilities, so not only can local traffic be varied and seasonal, but it also a key issue for all residents, visitors and businesses.

The town has embarked on a series of improvements to roads and junctions to add cycling and pedestrian services, but also to increase safety for all road users and make the town a nicer place to live and visit. As such, Wolfville engaged Mobycon, an international consultancy with a base in the Netherlands, to assist with the design & planning of these changes, which required baseline and ongoing traffic data for monitoring and evaluation. Mobycon introduced Telraam to the project, and the town purchased 20 devices to offer to residents and businesses.

The changes fall into two strands. A network-wide active transportation build is paving the Harvest Moon Trail through the centre of town, rebuilding Earnscliffe Avenue with new pavements, and adding bike lanes, shared pathways and wayfinding along the main routes. Alongside it, a Safer Streets pilot is trialling lower-cost ways to slow traffic, including speed tables at the eastern and western gateways, painted kerb extensions with bollards, new all-way stops, and centre-median bollards to make crossings more visible. Residential speed limits are also proposed to drop to 30 km/h. The pilot measures are planned to be rolled out and tested seasonally across 2026 and 2027.

The initial roll-out has 13 devices on key community locations such as the local 'greenway' cycle path, the main roads, and also a series of connecting residential roads. The town received many applications to host devices by residents, so they were able to select the most appropriate locations, as well as using some public buildings where relevant. More devices will be added in any locations that may require further monitoring.

The traffic measurement will continue while the summer programme of road improvements and resurfacing are going on, and will be able to quantify any short term impacts and longer term benefits, and allow any mitigating work to be better targeted using 'live' data.

Telraam and Mobycon will then provide the data analysis to take the project forward and review future traffic monitoring needs in the town