Estimates may be compiled of a volume of travelers in an area, such as vehicles, pedestrians, and migratory wildlife. Such estimates are often compiled through human observation and/or the deployment of regional monitoring equipment, such as roadside cameras and road-embedded sensors; however, such techniques may entail significant costs in equipment purchase, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance, and may exhibit inadequate accuracy and/or rapidity of data collection. Presented herein are techniques for estimating a traveler volume in an area by using an aerial device, such as a drone, to capture an aerial image of the area from an aerial perspective, and applying object recognition machine vision techniques to recognize and count the travelers depicted in the aerial image. Such data may be used to estimate traveler volume; to evaluate transit patterns of the travelers throughout a region; and/or to control transit patterns of the travelers using transit control devices.