Professor Khandker Nurul Habib was awarded funding from NSERC’s Collaborative Research and Development (CRD) Program to work with Stantec on the project “Simplified framework to forecast multimodal travel demand for mixed-use developments.”
Project Proposal Summary
Evaluating traffic impacts of urban development in a regular and routine exercise of transportation planning agencies.
Because of the incremental development processes in urban, it is sometimes impractical to employ regional land use and transportation interaction models to evaluate impacts of individual developments on the urban transportation system. So, a common practice is to use ‘Trip Generation Manual’ to quickly evaluate traffic impacts of any individual development in urban centers. Such manual provides a simplified table of approximate changes in an aggregate number of trips (one-way movement from one location to another) that may be induced by the specific type of development (e.g. residential building, commercial building, shopping malls, hospital etc.).
This research will take the Greater Toronto Area as the study area and develop mathematical models of traffic impacts (in terms of trip generation by different modes) at various parts of the study area.
The models will take the local context of urban centers in terms of detailed land use attributes and transit accessibility related variables to explain the impacts of traffic demand in terms of changes in trip generation corresponding to various categories of urban development.
The developed models will showcase the use of region-specific models as opposed to the naïve practice of using trip generate table/rates.
It will also highlight the appropriateness of using specialized models of traffic impact studies while the use of large-scale regional models is impractical to use.
Finally, this will promote the best practice of urban infrastructure development project evaluation in Canada.