Trip and Parking Generation for Student-Oriented Housing Developments

Abstract

While there are many different residential land uses in ITE’s Trip Generation Manual, there is no land use category related to housing for college and university students. These housing developments are located off-campus, house mostly students, and are commonly found in college towns. The use of existing trip generation models for townhomes and apartments may lead to inaccurate predictions of trips due to students’ travel behavior differences when compared to the general population. This study investigates the need for a separate land use consisting of student-oriented housing developments. Data were collected at twenty-six sites in three college towns: Auburn, Alabama, Clemson, South Carolina, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to determine if the trends differ from general apartment trip generation rates. A predictive model was developed using half of the collected data and checked using the other half of the data. This model was compared to Trip Generation’s Land Use 220, Apartments. Collected data supports the hypothesis that student-oriented housing does not follow the same trends as general apartments and a recommendation that the Trip Generation report should include a separate land use to account for these differences. Parking demand, mode choice, and the feasibility of a linear regression model with multiple independent variables were also studied. However, with the amount of available data, a meaningful model with multiple independent variables could not be developed. This research also suggests that the parking demand is higher at student-oriented housing as opposed to general apartment housing developments.