Semester of Graduation

Spring 2020

Degree

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Civil Engineering

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

The ITE Trip Generation Handbook has been in common use for about half a century to estimate vehicle trips generated by more than 172 land use categories as a function of establishment size (floor area) only. However, observed trip rates display a huge error range across different sites. Although contextual adjustment factors can ameliorate the error in the ITE trip generation estimates considerably, local site-specific trip generation rates should be collected for this purpose. Due to the huge time and monetary costs of data collection, adjusting the ITE trip generation rate is ignored by many jurisdictions. The primary contribution of this research is the theoretical development of an automated vehicle counting method at individual land uses using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth detections for the first time as a part of establishing the impact of contextual adjustment factors to the ITE trip generation rates. In this study, data was collected by both conventional and alternative methods for strip mall land use category across six parishes of Louisiana state and then compared to each other to develop contextual adjustment factors for the given land use category across the study area. The results of this study show that floor area and built environment factors explain about half of the trip rate variation observed in Louisiana and therefore it is suspected that there are still other factors that should be taken into account before accurate estimates of trip rates can be obtained. The automated data collection method using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth detections produces estimates that correlate with observed values with correlation coefficients that vary between 0.6 and 0.8.

Date

3-3-2020

Committee Chair

Wilmot, Chester

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_theses.5064

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