Traffic Impact Fee Calculator

Each land use type carries a different ITE trip generation rate reflecting how much vehicle traffic that type of use actually attracts — a restaurant typically draws far more trips per square foot than a general office building, since offices have relatively stable, spread-out arrival and departure patterns while restaurants see concentrated peak-hour turnover. That higher trip rate flows directly into a proportionally higher gross trip count and impact fee for the same building size.

Pass-by trips represent vehicles already traveling on the adjacent road for some other purpose that simply divert into the new development along their existing route, rather than generating an entirely new trip that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Since impact fees are meant to fund infrastructure burden from genuinely new traffic, crediting pass-by trips avoids charging a development for road usage that was already happening regardless of whether it was built.

No — gross trips are calculated purely from the land use type and building size using the ITE trip rate, independent of any reduction credits. Pass-by reduction, internal capture, and transit credit are all applied afterward to bring gross trips down to a net new trips figure, which is what actually determines the fee.

Fee-per-trip reflects each jurisdiction's own local cost estimates for the road capacity, intersection improvements, and other transportation infrastructure a new trip is expected to burden, which depends heavily on local construction costs, existing road capacity, and political decisions about how aggressively to fund infrastructure through development fees versus other revenue sources. This is why the same net new trip count can result in a very different total fee depending on where the project is located.