How do you estimate population served by a road?

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11-21-2018 03:45 AM
ChandanDas
New Contributor

I have layer of road and building footprint.

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RobMcDougald
New Contributor II

Hi Chandan.  I've been out of the travel demand management world for a while, so please take this with a grain of salt.  Maybe this tip will help you reach out to some urban transportation planners (or Google/Waze) within your organization or region that may already have the TAZs and O&D matrices setup to help do this?  Here is an article that kind of describes what is bouncing around my skull.

Estimating O-D Trips Between Sub-divided Smaller Zones Within a Traffic Analysis Zone | Request PDF 

Basically you would want to use existing transportation zones (TAZs) that may generate or attract trips (based upon land use types and population characteristics) that will ultimately be assigned to the road/corridor you want to evaluate.  This would provide you with the number of vehicles (and vehicle miles) that could potentially travel that corridor.  I would think there are some geoprocessing tools that could help review desire lines to summarize this?  

I've also read a little about a new Google/Waze pilot where they are releasing cellphone-level tracking data that might be usable to "count" trips from home to where ever.  

Hope I'm not sending you on too much of a wild goose chase.  Good luck. 

GaryGreenberg
New Contributor II

Can your data distinguish between building types (Single family, Fourplex) and uses (residential, commercial and accessory buildings)? You can assign a number of people to each residential structure then use a spatial join  to the get the closest road segment and create a summary. If the building already have an address you can use this.

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RobMcDougald
New Contributor II

If I understand Gary’s questions. Yes and Yes.

The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) develops trip generation rates (AM and PM) based upon land use types and building characteristics. Typical travel demand models typically utilize these “rates” in combination with land use inventories (or future planned land use scenarios) to develop the number of trips by time-of-day that a particular parcel might produce.

Google the term ITE Trip Generation Rates.

Good luck.

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GaryGreenberg
New Contributor II

Rob,

Interesting resource, thanks for that information. I just wonder if Chandan's building footprint layer has enough descriptive information to support a population estimate?  Building footprints alone may not be helpful because of structures that don't have people living in them. As you mentioned, I think looking to Census resources in combination with current local data can help to generate a reasonable population estimate. 

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