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Longs, and one trip arriving at home. While this is counted as two trips for Longs, there <br />is no impact to traffic, as the vehicle is already on the roadway. <br />The effect of employing these two concepts reduces the number of vehicle trips resulting <br />from the project. These individuals believe, based on their research of the traffic <br />engineering manuals that created these assumptions, that .using more conservative <br />assumptions would show more traffic at the Santa Rita/Valley intersection than the traffic <br />study shows and that the traffic report therefore understates that traffic. For example, <br />the Home Depot project generates 773 PM Trips. Of these, the number of trips that are <br />internal only was calculated to be 316. This reduces the on street trips to 457 trips. Of <br />these 457 trips, 215 trips were calculated to be already on the adjacent street, leaving a <br />total of 242 new trips that are on the roadway system as a result of the project. <br />Both internal capture and pass by reductions are standard practice in the Transportation <br />Planning industry. The Institute of Transportation Engineers has conducted numerous <br />studies and published "The Trip Generation Handbook" to guide the transportation <br />planning industry in this standard practice. Most of the data within the handbook is from <br />the 1990's and some of the study data is limited in terms of sample size; however, the <br />procedures and numbers have been the standard used in the transportation planning <br />industry for the last 15 years. The residents' greatest concern is the use of a pass-by <br />rate for the project which was based on only 3 studies and that even a small <br />discrepancy in the assumptions would cause an unacceptable amount of traffic on the <br />roadway. <br />Regarding weekday traffic, staff understands the concern of a possible underestimation <br />of the traffic production; however, the City's Traffic Engineer believes that the <br />assumptions in both internal capture and pass-by are reasonable in this case due to the <br />location of the shopping center site on two major arterials which carry significant <br />amounts of commuter traffic, some of which would be expected to stop at the shopping <br />center to visit more than one business on its way to and from work. <br />Although pass-by is a standard trip reduction, the City's Traffic Engineer removed the <br />pass-by assumptions from the trip generation calculation for both the weekday and <br />weekend trip generation to show the impact of the pass-by assumptions. These pass-by <br />trips were added back into the roadway network, and the intersections were analyzed for <br />level of service impacts. The level of service remained the same with the added trips <br />(although the delay slightly increased). <br />Regarding weekend traffic, the supplemental traffic study used the pass by and internal <br />capture rates that have been established for weekday p.m. peak hours. It is likely that <br />there is some level of internal capture and pass-by on the weekend, so it was decided <br />to use these reductions to maintain consistency between the 2006 Dowling report and <br />the supplemental report. However, there are not any published data for weekend <br />internal capture and pass-by that can be used to determine the quantity of these <br />weekend trips; therefore, staff has now eliminated these reductions from the weekend <br />analysis and has re-calculated the levels of service for the critical intersections. Even <br />Page 7 of 14 <br />