One of the fundamental questions of boat traffic monitoring that has not been addressed so far in this study is what the potential motivations for monitoring would be. This is not a trivial question, as that would have a large impact on what aspects of the traffic should be monitored.
If one is interested in obtaining information about environmental impacts of boat traffic, such as wake damage or emissions of pollutants, then one could use long-term descriptive statistics (mean, maximum, standard deviation) as a basis for these calculations. This information can be adequately obtained through long-term boat counts along the waterways in question, either by human observers or monitoring devices. The important factor to consider in this situation is the emphasis on the longer time-spans. Daily variation in traffic, especially for channels having less than 100 boat trips in a day, would be high enough as to make a three-day observation effort nearly meaningless.
If one is looking at calibration of bridge openings, that information would also best be calculated from boat counts and long-term statistics. From such numbers one could calculate the average rate of arrival of boats requiring a bridge opening, and from that decide whether having a bridge opening at regular intervals or by demand is better suited to their situation.