Trip and parking generation rates for different housing types: Effects of compact development

Guidelines for trip and parking generation in the United States come mainly from the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE). However, their trip and parking manuals focus on suburban locations with limited transit and pedestrian access. This study aims to determine how many fewer vehicle trips are generated and how much less parking demand is generated, by different housing types (single-family attached, single-family detached, and apartment and condo) and in different settings (from low density suburban environments to compact, mixed-use urban environments). Using household travel survey data from 30 diverse regions of the United States, we estimate a multilevel negative binomial model of vehicle trip generation and a multilevel Poisson model of vehicle ownership, vehicle trip generation and vehicle ownership being logically modelled as count variables. The models have the expected signs on their coefficients and have respectable explanatory power. Vehicle trip generation and vehicle ownership (and hence parking demand) decrease with the compactness of neighbourhood development, measured with a principal component that depends on activity density, land use diversity, percentage of four-way intersections, transit stop density and employment accessibility (after controlling for sociodemographic variables). The models capture the phenomena of ‘trip degeneration’ and ‘car shedding’ as development patterns become more compact. Reducing the number of required parking spaces, and vehicle trips for which mitigation is required, creates the potential for significant savings when developing urban projects. Guidelines are provided for using study results in transportation planning.

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