Case Study: Cartersville-Bartow MPO achieves a defensible 500–1,000 daily trip estimate for Pine Log WMA with Urban SDK

How Cartersville-Bartow MPO use Urban SDK's data and reporting platform to understand trip distribution in their region

Cartersville-Bartow MPO engaged Urban SDK to estimate daily trips to the Pine Log Wildlife Management Area, asking for a defensible "best estimate" of visitor-generated traffic using existing data rather than costly field surveys. Urban SDK supplied 2020 Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) data and applied industry-standard trip generation methods to address the MPO’s need for an evidence‑based, low‑cost traffic estimate.

Urban SDK combined its AADT traffic models, ITE trip rates, MPO land‑use GIS, and a proxy origin‑destination profile to remove internal (5.3%) and pass‑through (40.7%) trips and isolate WMA-generated trips at study gateways. The analysis yielded an estimated 500–1,000 daily trips to Pine Log WMA (sensitivity range about 300–1,200 depending on GFA assumptions), and highlighted that directly applying ITE park land‑use codes would have produced a much larger 7,000–9,000 trips, illustrating the influence of methodological choices.

Cartersville-Bartow MPO