MCU14/0106 Appendix D - Traffic Impact Assessment

                                                                                              Traffic Impact Assessment
                                                                                                 Noosa Civic Expansion




6              Commercial Office Scenario
6.1        Commercial Office Scenario
The Shire Business Centre map identifies further commercial development on the Shire Business Centre
site. The Noosa Civic Commercial Needs Assessment (Urbis, 2014) concludes that the need for commercial
floor space would represent a range of 1,360 – 8,000sq.m (additional) in Noosa Civic to 2031. QIC has
requested Cardno to assess the impacts of 7,000sq.m GFA of potential future commercial development at
Noosa Civic. The 7,000sq.m of commercial floor space is not part of the current proposal.
The objective of such assessment is to give some consideration to the potential traffic impacts of additional
commercial development if that were to occur in the future.

6.2        Traffic Generation
In addition to the assessment scenarios explained in section 5, Cardno has also assessed the addition of
7,000sq.m commercial floor space at Noosa Civic, to ensure that this can be accommodated by the road
network. This introduces the following scenario:
           > 2028 Background with Development and Commercial Floor Space.
The potential commercial development to be located between Central Road and Walter Hay Drive is
predicted to generate traffic volumes as presented in Table 6-1. The Saturday peak hour trip generation is
assumed to be 20% of the weekday peak hour trip generation. The latter is a conservative assumption given
that many, if not all, of the commercial uses would typically be closed on a Saturday.

Table 6-1      Trip Generation Estimation
Trip Generation                            Thursday PM Peak Hour                 Saturday AM Peak Hour
Trip Generation Rate                              3.4 trips/100sq.m                   0.68 trips/100sq.m
Total Trips                                           238 trips                             48 trips
Arriving                                      48 trips (20% split)                    24 trips (50% split)
Departing                                     190 trips (80% split)                   24 trips (50% split)

The distribution of the trips generated by the proposed commercial development is considered to be similar
to the retail trade network split of the expansion described in Figure 4-5 and Table 4-3. The number of
generated trips distributed across the external road network is calculated in Table 6-2.

Table 6-2      Total Trips Generated
                                          Thursday PM Peak Hour                  Saturday AM Peak Hour
External Road
                                       Arriving                    Departing   Arriving                Departing
Eumundi-Noosa Road                        2                           10          1                          1
Beckmans Road                            11                           46          6                          6
Eumundi Road                             10                           38          5                          5
Eenie Creek Road                         16                           63          8                          8
Walter Hay Drive                          9                           34          4                          4

The traffic generated by the commercial floor space has been assessed in addition to the development traffic
for the development scenario at the 2028 design horizon. Table 6-3 summarises the SIDRA results of the
analysed intersections, identifying the operational level of each intersection under this scenario at the 2028
design horizon.
The results indicate that 13 of the 16 intersections operate within capacity with a DOS of less than 0.85
under this scenario at the 2028 design horizon. For Intersection 1 and Intersection 4 which breached the
capacity, mitigation methods have been proposed where the new layouts enable the intersections to operate
within capacity during the 10 year design horizon.


J13041                                                            Cardno                                December 2014
Prepared for QIC Noosa Civic Pty Ltd                                                                         Page 43