Rindge could grow by almost 14 percent, from 5,018 in 1996 to 5,709 in 2015. All these new people will need homes to live in, businesses to work in and stores to shop in. Because planners have ways of predicting where new homes and businesses might be built, they can also predict where and when people might be driving their cars. In Keene, stores may be built in certain areas and homes in other areas, according to the city's land-use master plan, which is intended to help the city control development growth. That doesn't mean the future of Keene's development is set in stone, but the master plan can help planners as they make those educated guesses about where houses and businesses will be built in the future.
Planners also look at where developers have said they intend to build in the future.
They look at site plans and building permits on file. So that piece of land is considered a place where, in the future, many people will make many trips back and forth between home and work. Enter that into the computer model, along with all the other future land assumptions, and you get an average daily number of cars using the stretch of Route 9 where the Wal-Mart will be built. In 1990 there were 14,380 cars a day using that stretch of road. In 2015 there could be 31,480 cars using it, due in part to the Wal-Mart, according to the predictions.