Trip Attraction Rates of Shopping Centers in Northern New Castle County, Delaware

This report presents the trip attraction rates of the shopping centers in Northern New Castle County in Delaware. The study aims to provide an alternative to ITE Trip Generation Manual (1997) for computing the trip attraction of shopping centers in Delaware. As part of this study, a total of eighteen shopping centers were surveyed, for which the number of vehicles entering and leaving the shopping center in every fifteen minutes interval and the number of people visiting each store in the shopping center along with their movement patterns were measured. Based on the surveyed data and the aerial photographs, two approaches, microscopic and macroscopic, are developed to compute the trip attraction rate. The microscopic approach deals with the relationship between the trip attraction rates of individual stores and the shopping center as a whole. The macroscopic approach relates the trip attraction of the shopping center as a function of the physical features of the shopping center, e.g. total parking spaces, total floor area, and the number of stores in the shopping center. The study shows that microscopic approach gives a better estimate of trip attraction compared with the macroscopic approach. The proposed models incorporate the factors that have been neglected in ITE Trip Generation Manual. These models should be useful for estimating the traffic volume to/from a new shopping center which, is being planned and to assess the traffic impact of the shopping center on the geometric design of roadways in the surrounding area. The report consists of the description of the analytical approach, survey methods, the data collected from the survey and the analysis of the data using the models proposed.