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Busy Streets

Residential properties on busy streets are typically a negative on resale and on the homeowner unless the new owner is looking to also use that home for commercial purposes and willing/able to advertise that business with a sign on 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 in the event that it's an important one to you.


The Best Place to Go to Find 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 Busy Streets in Other States

The Best Place to Go to Find Street Views & other imagery (i.e. noise barriers for interstate traffic near homes)

The Best Place to Go to Find Current Traffic


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