A comparison of deterministic and stochastic approaches for the estimation of trips rates

Typically, traffic impact assessment is conducted to evaluate the impacts by proposed developments. In these assessments, trip rates are mostly adapted from local trip generation manual. This study is about evaluation on the current trip rates of commercial land use for three hypermarkets in Malaysia, by comparing deterministic and stochastic approaches. In this study, three deterministic approaches, Trip rate Analysis, Cross-Classification Analysis and Regression Analysis are applied to generate trip rates respectively. Similarly, stochastic approaches using ‘Weibull distribution’ are found appropriate for the collected trip generation data. The obtained mean trip rates have been critically examined for their suitability of use. The results indicate that the four approaches considered in this research produced significant variances from the estimated mean entry trip rates as mentioned in the Trip Generation Manual of Highway Planning Unit (HPU) of Malaysia.Therefore, this study debates the adoption of currently available trip rates for nationwide application and presents suggestions about the direction of future trip generation studies. In this regard, this study presents a framework for the estimation of trip rates for Malaysian conditions, based on the aforementioned four approaches along with some guidelines for their adoption. Keywords : Trip rates, traffic impact assessment, cross-classification analysis, Stochastic methods, Weibull distribution