Trip Generation

In the book, SimCity 2000: Power, Politics, and Planning Revised Edition, which is a wonderful book from a bygone era when Prima strategy guides were far more than essentially a GameFAQs guide with pictures, an interview mentions Trip Generation, in which Fred Haslam (co-designer of SC2K) receives a book called Trip Generation. According to Haslam, Trip Generation "is over a thousand pages and weighed more than both my cats. And it was nothing but graphs and numbers."

In my college library, I found a copy of Trip Generation, 5th edition, which either changed the page thickness since the edition Haslam received (likely in the early 1990s), or something because even though it has over 1500 pages, it doesn't weigh much (less than my adult cat at her weakest point). So, what is it? It measures, I think, the time of driving time and what type of trip (stop vs. destination) all with hundreds of graphs and frightfully specific "Land use" types, everything from a Racquet Club (462) to a High School (530). There's a difference between "Movie Theater without Matinee" and one with, and between a Supermarket and a "Supermarket, Discount". This being 1991, there was no "Supercenter / Discount Store With Supermarket" or even "Hypermarket".

There was a table of shopping centers and who stopped there on a pass-by trip or a destination (a study) that included some bygone names like the original Shoppers World and Manalaplan Mall. Both of these malls were gone even 12 years ago, though there were a few malls that are very much alive and well today (even a Kmart in Dover, Delaware, though the late 1980s was a very different time for Kmart). The book was extraordinarily confusing and would be a mess to fully implement in an early 1990s computer game (especially since all the commercial buildings in SC2K were more or less indistinguishable). I was going to attach some pictures to give you an idea on how weird this book is, but I ended up not taking, somehow, the picture I wanted to take (showing a typical page, in which there's an incomprehensible graph about something involving square feet as well as some chart), and instead took a picture of the wrong page. I have two pictures, however: one of the index (this doesn't have everything, though, it skips a lot) and one of the lists at the beginning (which has some of the stats of the main book, however, none of it lists the actual locations in which studies were done)