Trip generation for care homes and extra care housing

Applying dwelling trip rates to a care home overstates vehicle movements and understates parking demand at the same time. Residents of a registered care home largely do not drive, so the traffic the scheme generates comes from staff, visitors, deliveries and visiting health professionals. And because shifts overlap at handover, the number of cars on site at 07:30 can exceed the number of staff on duty at any point in the day.

That combination is what highway officers find hard to accept, and it is why a care home transport case has to be built from operator data rather than from a standard trip rate.

Why residential trip rates mislead

A registered care home falls within Class C2, residential institutions, under the Use Classes Order. The unit of demand is a bed, not a household, and the people occupying those beds generate almost no vehicle trips of their own.

Extra care and assisted living sit in a more awkward place. Where residents hold self-contained flats with a care package available, the classification between C2 and C3 is argued case by case, and the answer affects affordable housing policy, levy liability and the trip rates you should apply. Be explicit about which classification the application proceeds on and model the transport case consistently with it. A scheme presented as C2 for policy purposes and assessed on C3 trip rates invites exactly the objection you were trying to avoid.

Three differences from a housing scheme drive everything else:

• The resident population contributes few vehicle movements, and in a registered home close to none.
• Staff arrive and leave in concentrated bursts at shift change rather than spread across a commuter peak.
• Visitor demand peaks in the afternoon, in the early evening and at weekends, which is when a residential scheme is quiet.

Choosing comparable sites from the database

TRICS is the accepted source, and the quality of a care home assessment is mostly the quality of the site selection. Set out the filters you used and why.

1. Land use category, selecting the care home or residential institution category rather than a housing category.
2. The independent variable: trips per bed is usual for a registered home, and trips per 100 m² of gross floor area is the fallback where bed numbers are not recorded consistently.
3. Region and area type, excluding central urban sites if the application site is suburban and vice versa.
4. Parking provision at the surveyed sites, because a surveyed home with 40 spaces behaves differently from one with 12.
5. Survey date range, with a reasoned cut-off. Older surveys predate changes in staffing models and in visiting patterns.
6. Day type, so that a weekday assessment is not diluted by weekend surveys.

Report the number of sites in the final set, the range as well as the mean, and the sensitivity of the conclusion to the two or three most influential sites. A set of four sites with a wide spread should be presented as such rather than averaged into a single confident figure.

Where the database set is thin, a bespoke survey at one or two of the operator's existing homes of similar size and model is worth the cost. Carry it out in a neutral month and follow the conventions on traffic counts in neutral months and survey validity, because a survey in August or the week before Christmas will be dismissed.

Staff shifts and the peak hour question

Get the rota from the operator, in writing, for a home of the same size and care model. What you need is the number of staff on each shift, the shift start and finish times, the handover overlap, and the proportion of staff expected to drive.

A common pattern in a residential home is a long day shift starting in the early morning, a night shift starting in the evening, and additional ancillary staff in catering, housekeeping, maintenance and administration working office hours. Nursing homes carry higher staff ratios and more clinical visits. None of those patterns lines up neatly with the highway network peak.

That has two consequences the transport assessment must present separately.

For junction capacity, the development's own peak may fall outside the network peak, so the assessment should test the network peak hours and the development's own peak, and state both. Burying the development peak inside a network peak table hides the parking issue.

For parking, the governing moment is handover, when the outgoing and incoming shifts are both on site. Size the staff parking for that overlap, not for the average staffing level, and say so explicitly in the parking justification.

Visitors, deliveries and care workers

Visitor movements are the part most often underestimated. Afternoon and early evening visiting, concentrated at weekends and heavier around holidays, produces a parking demand that is uncorrelated with staff demand and sometimes coincides with it.

Service movements are smaller in number and larger in vehicle size: food deliveries, laundry, clinical waste, pharmacy, oxygen, maintenance and refuse. Each needs a swept path on the layout and a servicing position that does not block the drop-off or the fire appliance route. Pharmacy and clinical deliveries can be daily.

Then there are visiting professionals: district nurses, general practitioners, physiotherapists, chiropodists, hairdressers and faith visitors. Individually small, collectively a steady stream of short-stay parking through the middle of the day, which is the period staff parking is least used. That overlap is the argument for shared rather than allocated spaces.

For an extra care scheme, add domiciliary care workers arriving for scheduled calls, which generates a distinctive pattern of short visits through the morning and evening.

Parking for staff and visitors

Local standards for C2 development are usually expressed per bed, per staff member or per some combination, and they vary widely between authorities. Start from the adopted standard, then justify any departure with evidence rather than with a general statement about sustainable travel.

The components to set out separately:

Shared use between these groups is the thing that makes a realistic provision work, and the case for it needs a parking accumulation profile across a 24-hour period rather than a single total. Where the site is in an area with on-street parking pressure, a Parking Survey using an accepted methodology gives the officer something to weigh against the fear of overspill.

Accessible parking and drop-off

A care home has a higher proportion of visitors with reduced mobility than almost any other use, and the standard accessible parking percentage applied to an office is not the right starting point. Provide accessible bays close to the main entrance, with a level or gently graded route, a canopy over the entrance and space for a wheelchair transfer on both sides where the layout allows.

The drop-off needs to accommodate a private ambulance or patient transport vehicle, which is longer than a car and needs rear access for a tail lift. Design it so a vehicle can wait without blocking circulation, and keep it separate from the service bay. Funeral directors' vehicles also need a discreet and practical arrangement, which operators will raise even if the highway officer does not.

Cycle parking for staff, sheltered and overlooked, is worth more than it costs. So is a sensible location for taxi pick-up, because taxis carry a substantial share of visitor trips to care homes.

Making the case to a sceptical highway officer

Highway officers see a lot of optimistic transport assessments, and the honest response is to show your working. What tends to persuade:

1. The operator's actual staffing rota for a comparable home, attached as an appendix with the home identified by size and care model rather than by name.
2. A bespoke survey at an existing home, with the methodology, the dates and the weather recorded.
3. A parking accumulation profile by hour across a weekday and a Saturday, with each demand component shown separately.
4. A Travel Plan with measures aimed at staff rather than residents, including shift-compatible public transport information, a car share scheme and secure cycle parking, plus monitoring and a review trigger.
5. A parking management plan naming who allocates spaces and how overspill is handled.
6. A commitment to a post-occupation survey with a mechanism if the predictions prove wrong.

That last item changes the conversation more than any modelling refinement, because it shifts the risk back towards the applicant. Where the scheme exceeds the floorspace at which a full Transport Assessment rather than a statement is expected, build it in from the start; the thresholds PlanScope uses to flag the report are 50 or more units or 2,500 m² or more, and the authority's own validation list and local policy take precedence over any rule of thumb.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. Transport assessment is work councils expect from a suitably qualified author, and professional review is strongly advised.

To scope the transport and other evidence a care scheme needs, enter your postcode on PlanScope and work through the guided questions. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.