Service trip attraction in commercial establishments

Commercial traffic in urban areas has not received the level of attention it deserves. Notwithstanding recent research on freight trip generation, other components of commercial traffic, such as commercial service traffic, have been largely overlooked. This is ironic, as the service sector represents a major and growing portion of urban and metropolitan economies. The research reported in this paper intends to help fill an important research gap through analyses of unique survey data collected by the authors. To this effect, the research comprehensively characterizes service visits to commercial establishments—in terms of frequency, purpose, duration, time of day, and other characteristics—by industry sector for two metropolitan areas. In addition, the authors estimated econometric models that express the number of service trips to commercial establishments as a function of the economic characteristics of the establishment and assessed the geographic transferability of the models obtained. To gain insight into the overall magnitude of service-related traffic, the models were applied to publicly available data to estimate the service activity in American cities of various sizes. The resulting service traffic are then used to estimate of parking requirements of service and freight vehicles for the most congested ZIP codes at these cities. The paper ends with a discussion of chief findings and policy implications.