Abstract
Assessing the traffic impact of building a new development raises something of a problem, as by definition there is no traffic to survey until construction has already finished, by which time it will be far too late to start raising objections. The technique known as 'gravity modelling' tries to address the issue by using demographic data as a proxy for actual demand. However, this is often very time-consuming to conduct manually, and thus leads to coarse or limited analysis. The author demonstrates ODYSSEUS, a GIS module which not only automates the number-crunching, but also attempts to assign the implied traffic onto the surrounding road network, thus making link-based analysis a practical option. (Author/publisher).