Traffic Impact Analysis, a standard process to perform traffic study for site developments, has become a popular and successful decision making tool for public agencies.
Real estate development in India is growing exponentially ever since the IT boom started back in the 1990s. But the main concern is to provide a better infrastructure to meet the increasing travel demand as new developments generate new vehicles on roads. According to the latest statistics, around 40,000 vehicles get registered every month in all the metropolitan cities of India. One of the major impacts of this development is traffic congestion, which eventually causes travel delays, air pollution, distress, accidents and loss of revenue. Although the increase in travel demand cannot be prevented, it can be managed by implementing new operational strategies. To understand the scenario better, Traffic Impact Studies play a crucial tool.
In developed countries such as Australia, New Zealand, UK and USA, new developments are highly scrutinised at the planning stage, evaluating their impact on existing road systems. All these countries have developed a standard process to perform traffic study for site developments, termed as Traffic Impact Analysis (TIA). It has become a popular and successful decision making tool for public agencies to mitigate impacts with better planning strategies.
Conducting a TIA involves various steps starting from site analysis, data acquisition and engineering analysis in finding the measures to mitigate impacts. However, the foundation to the study is the trip generation which plays a crucial role in estimating new trips. Analysts often find it challenging to perform trip generation analysis as it requires historical trips data collected locally. One of the popular sources is the Trip Generation Manual series from the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) that provides ready-to-use trip rates and equations to generate trips for some well-defined land uses. However, the challenge is to access these appropriate rates by carrying and flipping through the books or tables of data.
To overcome the issue, a Web-based application Online Traffic Impact Study Software (OTISS) developed by Transoft Solutions Inc was created in cooperation with ITE. It is the first ever cloud-based application to instantly look up trip rates and perform Traffic Impact Study. It not only helps looking up trip rates and equations, it also lets the analyst to filter data and estimate new rates and equations. Besides, analysts can create TIA projects, use appropriate trips rates to generate trips and estimate new traffic at driveways and nearby intersections and waypoints of proposed developments. Once a project is analysed, it can also be shared with other analysts for collaboration and examination purposes. Furthermore, OTISS helps to create own trip generation datasets and to come up with own trip rates and equations.
WHAT MAKES OTISS WORK IN INDIA?
Analysts in India often do not prefer to use ITE data as it overestimates vehicle trips and it does not estimate trips from other modes of travel. Not anymore. OTISS is now capable of converting ITE vehicle trips to total baseline site person trips, which help to relate total person trips generation at any study site in the world. It will further convert study site person trips to local custom modal trips using local occupancy and mode share data. Unlike other TIA tools, OTISS helps analysts to estimate person trips demand at identified waypoints around the proposed developments. It is perfectly made for analysing multimodal facilities. OTISS has been widely accepted and used in many countries as a crucial tool for Traffic Impact Analysis.
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