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Current Issue | Previous Issues | Subscribe May 2007 - Vol. 5, No. 5

Policy & Planning

Second Access to Destinations conference coming in August

In November 2004, the Center for Transportation Studies hosted Access to Destinations, a conference featuring over 25 invited papers and 75 attendees. The international conference resulted in a set of proceedings and a book containing select papers; information is available on the Access to Destinations Web site.

Building on the success of the 2004 conference, CTS is sponsoring a follow-up two-day conference with a similar theme: "Access to Destinations."

Issues that this conference seeks to address include:

• The relationship between transportation services, the location of activities, and the ability of individuals to access destinations including work, education, medical care, shopping, and recreation.
• The factors influencing the location decisions of households and organizations, and the investment and service provision decisions of public agencies and private firms.
• The effectiveness of policies, including land development strategies, zoning, and neighborhood designs in affecting accessibility.

This two-day conference is scheduled for August 23 and 24, 2007, on the University of Minnesota campus. It will feature a half-day of presentations and discussions open to the public, followed by a day-and-a-half of technical presentations and discussions with approximately 75 researchers and invited participants.

For more information on attending the second Access to Destinations Conference, visit the conference Web page.

MnPASS project wins award

Once in place, most residents support value pricing. This is one of the findings from the “Minnesota I-394 MnPASS Project,” winner of this year’s CTS Research Partnership Award. Lee Munnich of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs reviewed the team’s work at the CTS Annual Meeting and Awards Luncheon held March 27.

The MnPASS express lane on I-394 west of Minneapolis opened in May 2005 as the first test-bed for value pricing in Minnesota. The team’s project involved education, outreach, and evaluation efforts, including surveys of area residents. The work has led to an increased awareness among transportation, political, business, environmental, and other community leaders that value pricing may be an important long-term tool for managing congestion in the Twin Cities.

Researchers led by Munnich carried out extensive investigations of the effects of research and education efforts connected to the MnPASS project. Their findings were released in a report, Minnesota Value Pricing Outreach and Education (Mn/DOT 2006-38), published by the Minnesota Department of Transportation and available from the Mn/DOT Web site.

Munnich said the project would not have been possible without the contributions of many, including the Federal Highway Administration, state leaders, local elected officials, MnPASS Task Force members, and the implementation team.

“It’s not done yet,” Munnich added. The MnPASS partnership continues to explore ways of improving access and throughput on I-394 as well as improving transit advantages in the corridor, and it will soon be exploring the potential for MnPASS lanes on I-35W. (To learn more about MnPASS, see www.mnpass.org.)

Transportation knowledge networks: Shaping the future of transportation information access

Technology is changing the paradigm for how we find and use transportation information. What kind of transportation information are we talking about? Anything that practitioners need to do their jobs well—including research reports, syntheses, manuals, datasets, best practice examples, links to people and organizations, and more.

Last year, AASHTO asked a distinguished panel of transportation leaders to recommend a strategy for taking transportation information access into the 21st century. The solution? Transportation Knowledge Networks (TKNs)—modeled after successful approaches in the health and agriculture fields, and piloted for transportation in the Midwest region (the Midwest Transportation Knowledge Network or MTKN).

National Highway Cooperative Research Program (NCHRP) Project 20-75 is developing a business plan for implementing regional TKNs and a national coordination function. The project team is seeking input from transportation leaders, researchers, and practitioners—in public agencies, academic institutions, associations, and private industry—to ensure that the business plan targets the highest priority needs and makes the best possible case for investment. You are invited to take a few minutes to provide your comments.

Transit, Bicycling, & Walking

Safety of pedestrian and bicycle travel in Minnesota

For transportation researcher Kevin Krizek, traffic safety for bicyclists and pedestrians is not just an academic topic—it’s a daily personal concern. Krizek, an assistant professor of urban planning and regional affairs in the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Policy, is the director of the Active Communities/Transportation (AC/T) research group, which focuses on issues related to nonmotorized transportation, and is also an avid cyclist who commutes to campus in all weather. He and other researchers affiliated with the AC/T group have recently completed a final research report on safety issues affecting cyclists and pedestrians in Minnesota.

Bicycling and walking are integral to meeting the transportation needs of millions of travelers every day, and the benefits of nonmotorized travel—for the body and for the pocketbook—are spurring more Americans to use these modes every day. Safety, however, remains a concern, with many cyclists and pedestrians involved in collisions with motor vehicles and other crashes.

The new report covers research that was motivated in part by the goals of the Toward Zero Deaths program, an initiative of the Minnesota Department of Transportation and Department of Public Safety to reduce traffic fatalities statewide.

In order to gain a better understanding of crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists, the researchers inventoried available data in Minnesota and used these data to explore the relationship between crashes and a variety of neighborhood attributes. In addition, the final report summarizes the findings of a variety of research studies on pedestrian and bicycle crashes carried out in Minnesota between 1998 and 2002.

Data analysis enabled the researchers to identify certain intersections and other locations in the Twin Cities area where high levels of crashes occur, and to examine some of the trends and factors that affect crash rates. The report concludes with a series of recommendations aimed at improving data gathering on pedestrian and bicycle crashes.

The Safety of Pedestrian and Bicycle Travel in Minnesota: Inventory, Analysis and Prospectus is available from the Mn/DOT Web site.

Journal of Public Transportation

The Journal of Public Transportation, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2007, published by the National Center for Transit Research at the University of South Florida, includes these articles, available at www.nctr.usf.edu:

• Reforming Innercity Bus Transportation in a Developing Country: A Passenger-Driven Model
• Making Regional Railroads More Attractive— Research Studies in Germany and Patronage Characteristics
• Design and Evaluation of Passenger Ferry Routes
• Allocation and Use of Section 5310 Funds in Urban and Rural America
• An Evaluation of Los Angeles’s Orange Line Busway

Intelligent Transportation Systems

University of Minnesota researchers address ITS Minnesota annual meeting and information exchange

ITS Institute director Max Donath and Northland Advanced Transportation Systems Research Laboratories (NATSRL) director Eil Kwon presented some of their current research at the ITS Minnesota annual meeting and information exchange in Duluth, Minnesota April 23.

Donath described ongoing work on behalf of the National Park Service by researchers from the Twin Cities campus. Their research focuses on improving the visitor experience at Alaska’s Denali National Park, an extremely popular tourist destination that faces the challenge of balancing access for visitors against the need to provide an unspoiled habitat for wildlife. Much of the park is served by a single road used by wildlife tour operators, and managing traffic on the road has become increasingly important as the number of visitors to the park has increased dramatically in recent decades.

Allowing too many vehicles to use the park road risks driving away the animals that visitors are keen to see, such as bears and moose. The University of Minnesota researchers are working with biologists and park staff to create a model of vehicle and animal movements within the park, in order to determine the best ways of moving visitors through the park without excessive disturbance to its animal inhabitants.

Eil Kwon gave attendees an overview of the operation of the NATSRL labs, located on the Duluth campus of the University of Minnesota. The labs feature a diverse set of researchers working on new sensor systems, traffic data management and analysis, and cold-weather operations issues, among other topics.

Kwon described the program’s primary focus as the development of innovative technologies having a high possibility of implementation, hopefully shortening the research and development cycle significantly and bringing prototype products quickly into use to solve current transportation issues.

Transportation Infrastructure

MnROAD Lessons Learned: A history of innovative pavement research

Now in its 13th year of operations, the Minnesota Road Research Facility (MnROAD) has made important contributions to the understanding of pavement design and performance. MnROAD Lessons Learned is a new report from the Minnesota Department of Transportation, and one of the first projects initiated by the Transportation Engineering and Road Research Alliance (TERRA), MnROAD's new governing body.

MnROAD Lessons Learned was prepared by civil engineering associate professor Lev Khazanovich, a leading pavement researcher who has directed numerous innovative research projects focusing on portland cement concrete and hot-mix asphalt, and Derek Tompkins, associate director of the University of Minnesota’s Pavement Research Institute.

Joint sealing, thin and ultra-thin whitetopping, and the effects of temperature on cracking and wear have proven to be among the most fruitful areas for MnROAD research. Findings in these areas continue to contribute to pavement management practices in Minnesota and beyond the state’s borders.

In addition, engineers and pavement researchers working at MnROAD have gained a wealth of knowledge about how to successfully instrument and monitor pavement sections for long-term data gathering. Methods developed at MnROAD have influenced pavement research projects at other facilities.

MnROAD is currently preparing for significant reconstruction and upgrades that will position it to continue as a leading facility for pavement research. Also, TERRA will be developing Research Fact Sheets to disseminate additional information about the lessons learned at the facility.

Upcoming Events

Here are selected events related to transportation research. Visit the CTS Web site, www.cts.umn.edu/events, for more comprehensive event information. You may also subscribe to e-mail event announcements using our subscription form.

August 23–24, 2007
2007 Access to Destinations Conference, University of Minnesota. More

September 17–18, 2007
2007 Toward Zero Deaths Conference, Duluth Entertainment Convention Center, Duluth, Minnesota. Contact Shirley Mueffelman at 612-624-4754 or conferences2@cce.umn.edu. More

October 16–17, 2007
2007 AirTAP Fall Forum, Breezy Point Conference Center, Breezy Point, Minnesota. Contact Tom Helms, helms032@cts.umn.edu or 612-626-1745. More