Transportation and Mixed Use
Twin Cities Business, February 2007
City planners and developers in Minnesota hope to produce high-impact mixed-use developments that leverage the transportation infrastructure. In this article, CTS director Robert Johns discusses the Center's Access to Destinations research study and its research collaboration with the American Institute of Architects.
Excerpt:
'The success of Hiawatha has just blown away the debate about whether transit was worth investing in at all. Now the debate is focused more on what kind of transit is best for us,” says Robert Johns, director of the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota.
The center hopes to inform that debate with a pair of research projects focused around transportation and land use. The first study, 'Access to Destinations,' was inspired, in part, by the Texas Transportation Institute's reported congestion rates, which Johns and his colleagues content describe only how fast people travel from one area to another, not whether they're having increased difficulty accessing their desired destinations. 'Our researchers are saying that it's good to know about and important to track congestion levels,' he says. 'But they don't really tell you how well the transportation system is performing, because the primary purpose of the transportation system is to provide access to destinations.'
The Center for Transportation Studies also is collaborating with the American Institute of Architects on a study, funded by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration, that focuses on the impact well-designed transportation projects have on communities. 'We're trying to educate people, especially those at our policy levels, about how closely connected transportation is to land use,' Johns says. 'The linkages are complex, so it's certainly not simply. But there needs to be an awareness that as we plan our transportation system, we need to do it in conjunction with land use and development patterns. They're very intricately linked.'