This article describes research whose main objective is to determine the traffic generation characteristics of recently developed non-food retail parks in offcentre urban sites, and fringe, green fie d sites, with particular reference to those parks containing large "do it yourself" hardware stores. The traffic characteristics investigated were: (a) visitation rates, in relation to gross floor area, turnover etc; (b) peak entry and exit traffic flows; (c) parking space provision, parking duration, and accumulation; (d) transport mode selection for shopping trips; (e) catchment area populations and shopping trip lengths; and (f) the proportion of newly generated trips, as opposed to diverted trips. Six out of town parks in South East England were monitored. Two near Basingstoke and one near each of the following towns of Fareham, Reading, Gillingham and Andover. The first part of this paper gives a brief description of the sites and their characteristics and presents the main findings of the pilot studies. The second part of the paper discusses the problems revealed by the pilot studies and describes the current studies. The first round of current surveys indicates that the truly new generated trips formed only 5.29% of total trips attracted by this new retail development. The vast majority of visitors (83%) came from a 20 minutes drive catchment area of the centre.
Samenvatting