Overview
The assessment of traffic demand from individual or multiple traffic generators should be based on well-founded information about specific traffic generation rates (i.e. on values based on experience). Within Switzerland and the other continental European countries, no well-documented measurements of traffic generation are available to those practitioners in this field, particularly for the assessment of the effects new uses on traffic.
Data acquisition and reporting needs to be standardised in order to facilitate the recording and compilation of such rates.
This project will clarify the content and the operational aspects of the database for traffic generation rates.
Funding
Results
An online database for traffic generation data was set up and tested during the project. The goal is, in the long run, to provide reliable traffic generation rates for different types of facilities and make them publicly available to interested professionals. The data are required for the traffic impact assessment of individual traffic generators or small dwelling areas.
As the situation currently is, practically all interested parties are left behind with insufficient data stocks. Given the relatively high costs for collecting large sets of counting data, it is obvious that an individual actor, be it a bureau or an administration, cannot afford data of sufficient volumes to ensure a good quality of the resulting analyses.
The continuous collection of the datasets owned by many actors would allow a steady improvement of the analyses: more precise estimates for the characteristic values, more detailed classifications of land use types and eventually more robust estimates for multivariate functional relationships. The project aims to collect the many existing, but widely dispersed datasets owned by individual actors and make their aggregated characteristic values available to the public.
The report details the technical approach chosen in the research project funded by the Federal Roads Office, steered by VSS and supported by the international working group “Verkehrserzeugung von Grossnutzungen”, and sketches possible organizational solutions for the maintenance of the database.
The form template for the database was based on the standardized metadata for the documentation of surveys of trip generation rates for individual traffic generators. Data entry is done by the respective user, online and using the form, which is linked to the database server. Right after providing their data, the user can oversee and download them in a standardised format.
Furthermore, detailed tables and figures are displayed for the entered data. As there is already a certain amount of data in the database, aggregated analyses of trip generation rates for certain land use types can also be generated. Thus, the user can put their own data in a larger context and compare them to the average trip generation rates for other generators of the same type. In a first phase, the analyses offered are average trip generation rates for certain land use type depending on the determining factors. These rates are provided for the time intervals specified. Provided that there will be a sufficien