July 9

2 comments

Announcing Open Source Trip Generation Data

By Mike Spack

July 9, 2015

creative commons, ITE, ite generation, open source, Trip Generation, tripgeneration.org
Photo courtesy nipitphand from FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Photo courtesy nipitphand from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The daily trips per household in Minnesota dropped from 11.1 trips in 2000 to 8.8 trips in 2010.  You can read recent articles from the University of Minnesota about  how travelers in general are spending less time on the road and how different aged folks trips are going down.

Combining these significant changes in travel behavior with the limited information in the  ITE Trip Generation Manual data set (we don’t know how old the data is) has led us at Spack Consulting to start collecting current, localized trip generation data in addition to using rates from the ITE Trip Generation Manual in our studies.  This is actually recommended in the Trip Generation Handbook.

Since we like to share, we’ve launched TripGeneration.org to freely share our data under a Creative Commons license.  Plug your name and email into the form and you’ll get emailed all of our data in one big spreadsheet.

Trip Gen Combined ImageLearn more at TripGeneration.org

We are continually collecting trip generation data and are committing to updating the spreadsheet at least every quarter.  We’re also hoping to start a movement towards FREE open source trip generation data.  I see the day where we develop an app so everyone can freely filter the data to develop relevant forecasts based both on geography and current data (but we’re settling for giving you the data in a big spreadsheet with summary rates calculated).

I hope you’ll check out TripGeneration.org and let me know what you think!

  • Minor quibble, open source is just for software code. This is simply open data, which you share under an creative commons license (Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License) which is great!

    Congratulations for this initiative, we need more of that in transportation engineering! How about open source highway capacity software and traffic control timing software? 😉

  • Nicolas,

    Thanks for the feedback. You’re definitely right on “open source,” but I think it’s still a good shorthand for what we’re trying to do as far as the general community is concerned.

    And I’m totally with you on basic open source software for our industry.

    Mike

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    Mike Spack

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