The four-step transportation model plays an important role in urban planning. The quality of the first phase, i.e. trip generation, determines the performance of the global course. The majority of trip generation forecasting models highly rely on mathematical derivation and have many predictor variables during the prediction, which leads to low accuracy of results and requires laboriously hand-crafted design of input vectors. This paper is the first to introduce the gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) algorithm for trip generation prediction, and harmonizes such a powerful machine learning method with traditional urban planning requirements to achieve better prediction performance. Unlike the commonly used linear regression method, GBDT can automatically perform feature selection and model the non-linear relationships between input and output variables. Experimental results on real-world residential travel census in Beijing prove that the GBDT model significantly outperforms the baseline and can forecast the trip generation more accurately.