Trip generation data is at the core of how transportation professionals make traffic forecasts. Do a search of my blog and you’ll see trip generation has been a recurring theme over the last nine years.
ITE has been the broker/arbiter of trip generation data for 50+ years. They did a wonderful job with 1960’s technology, but we started TripGeneration.org out of frustration with ITE’s lack of modernization plus they’re business model.
If you’re at all interested in the future of trip generation data, here are three ways you can consider helping our industry improve our dataset:
- Support ITE’s call for data for the 10th Edition. It still bothers me that ITE expects us to voluntarily contribute data that they then turn around and sell themselves (as well as license third party vendors to sell). However, ITE is important to our industry and we’ve decided we’ll be submitting our 7,500+ hours of data to them. I encourage you to also submit your data.
- Use the data freely available from TripGeneration.org and also consider sharing your data with us. We are open with all of our data and it’s free. We want to encourage using current, local trip generation data whenever possible. Email me at mspack@spackconsulting.com if you have any questions or want to share data with us.
- Check out TripChain.org. This could be the future of trip generation, whether ITE implements the technology or a third party does. Basically, it is bringing the distributed and robust nature of block chain technology to our trip generation datasets. I believe our industry should explore moving to this model.
Want to partner with us to collect your own local trip generation data? We have a limited pool of COUNTcam video collection products that we’re lending for free specifically for this purpose. Contact Sales at CountingCars.com or leave your contact information in the comments section if you’re interested.
