Trip generation

Trip generation is the first step in the conventional four-step transportation forecasting process (followed by trip distribution, mode choice, and route assignment), widely used for forecasting travel demands. It predicts the number of trips originating in or destined for a particular traffic analysis zone.Guidelines for trip generation analysis

Typically, trip generation analysis focuses on residences, and residential trip generation is thought of as a function of the social and economic attributes of households. At the level of the traffic analysis zone, residential land uses "produce" or generate trips. Traffic analysis zones are also destinations of trips, trip attractors. The analysis of attractors focuses on nonresidential land uses.

A forecasting activity, such as one based on the concept of economic base analysis, provides aggregate measures of population and activity growth. Land use forecasting distributes forecast changes in activities in a disaggregate-spatial manner among zones. The next step in the transportation planning process addresses the question of the frequency of origins and destinations of trips in each zone: for short, trip generation.

The first zonal trip generation (and its inverse, attraction) analysis in the Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS) followed the “decay of activity intensity with distance from the central business district (CBD)” thinking current at the time. Data from extensive surveys were arrayed and interpreted on a-distance-from-CBD scale. For example, a commercial land use in ring 0 (the CBD and vicinity) was found to generate 728 vehicle trips per day in 1956. That same land use in ring 5 (about 17 km (11 mi) from the CBD) generated about 150 trips per day.

The case of trip destinations will illustrate use of the concept of activity decline with intensity (as measured by distance from CBD) worked. Destination data are arrayed:

The land use analysis provides information on how land uses will change from an initial year (say t = 0) to some forecast year (say t = 20). Suppose we are examining a zone. We take the mix of land uses projected, say, for year t = 20 and apply the trip destination rates for the ring in which the zone is located. That is, there will this many acres of commercial land use, that many acres of public open space, etc., in the zone. The acres of each use type are multiplied by the ring specific destination rates. The result is summed to yield the zone’s trip destinations. It is to be noted that the CATS assumed that trip destination rates would not change over time.

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