Improving Trip Generation Estimates for Canadian Sites using Aggregation and Extraction Techniques

Trip generation analysis plays a vital role in determining the impact of new land use developments. Trips are generally estimated using regionally established trip rates from trip generation data collected over the period of time at specific land uses. However, some regions, which do not have their own data, usually rely on trip generation data published by other similar regions or data collected by Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), USA. Over the last 50 years, ITE has already collected data at over 26,000 sites in various parts of USA and Canada for 173 different types of land uses. As only a small subset of data (~0.5%) is from Canada, there is a question as to whether that data could better represent Canadian sites. As ITE’s Trip Generation Manuals in the hardcopy format do not facilitate viewing trip rates and equations for specific regions (i.e. country or state) or ability to aggregate data with local data, practitioners face several challenges in using ITE’s data for Canadian sites. To emphasize the need of revised trip rates, data from 66 Canadian sites were extracted from ITE’s trip generation data and statistically compared with the ones from USA. Results showed that trip rates for USA sites are slightly higher than trip rates for Canadian sites. Based on this finding, this paper illustrates that by having a way to extract ITE’s data by regions and aggregate with their local data could benefit Canadian practitioners performing qualitative trip generation analyses. And, it emphasizes the importance of collecting more regional data.