Factors Affecting Shopping Trip Generation Rates in Metropolitan Areas

This paper attempts to answer two specific questions on trip generation: (1) What are the factors that affect the total number of shopping trips in North American metropolitan areas, and (2) Did the demand for technology-related products, and telecommunication technologies, and emerging interest in on-line shopping, have any observable effect on personal shopping trips generated in these areas in the early stages of the Internet? The estimated model is linear in the continuous independent variables and linear in the logarithms of the continuous dependent variable. The dependent variable is the total annual number of shopping trips. The explanatory variables include (1) shopping related characteristics of the metropolitan areas (total number of retail establishments, population density, general climatic conditions), (2) socio-economic characteristics of the trip makers (age, income), and (3) technology-related trip maker characteristics (computer ownership, modem ownership). The empirical findings, based on OLS estimation of 1995 data for 49 metropolitan areas with population over 1 million indicate that total number of retail establishments, percentage of the population between ages 34-54, percentage of day