Study framework

The Center for Transportation Studies (CTS) at the University of Minnesota completed the Transportation and Regional Growth (TRG) Study, a five-year research effort examining the relationship between transportation and regional growth, in [official year]. Findings from the TRG Study’s 16 research reports, summarized in the report titled Market Choices and Fair Prices: Research Suggests Surprising Answers to Regional Growth Dilemmas, have attracted attention from the media and policymakers in addition to transportation professionals and researchers. The TRG Study brought us a wealth of new information about transportation and land use relationships and suggested some broad policy directions for professionals and policy leaders to consider, but it also raised new questions and issues that deserve further research.

This interest is tied closely to the growing issue of traffic congestion in the Twin Cities metropolitan area and in regional centers in Minnesota—a problem that has grown significantly in the last decade. During this time, the Minnesota news media have increased their coverage of travel delays and long commutes, while legislative committees and city councils have spent more time holding hearings and debating about how to address this growing public policy issue.

Additional factors fueling the intense interest in transportation include concerns about the effects of urban growth on the areas surrounding the Twin Cities, and the growing awareness that workers’ access to jobs has important economic implications for all urban and suburban residents.

In this page:

• Goals of the Access to Destinations Study
• Study components

Goals of the Access to Destinations Study

People travel to reach destinations for many activities, such as work, shopping, education, and recreation. Measures of congestion (such as those developed by the Texas Transportation Institute and widely reported in the press) describe only how fast people travel relative to a determined baseline speed. Such measures do not describe whether people’s ability to access destinations has worsened.

Related research findings from the TRG Study point to some interesting possibilities. For example, the travel time budget research in the TRG Study suggests that over time people and organizations are making location decisions to maintain their levels of accessibility. TRG findings also suggest that the mix of land use activities at destinations influences the transportation modes residents choose to access those activities.

More understanding about how our accessibility is changing, as well as better information on congestion, would tell us how our transportation/land use system is working—whether it is getting better or worse, and in what ways. With better data, enhanced modeling capabilities, and additional performance measures, we could test how improvements to various types of accessibility would impact travel behavior or other aspects of life in the region.

New knowledge and tools could help us evaluate the impacts of transportation strategies such as expanded freeway and road systems, transit investments, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies and operational improvements, and land use designs that emphasize bicycle and pedestrian travel systems. We could also help determine what strategies would improve the reliability of travel times for major corridors of our transportation system. In addition, we could evaluate the impacts of alternative land development strategies on accessibility.

The Access to Destinations Study is intended to develop these capabilities and to stimulate public discussion of research findings and their implications for public policy. Our goal is to bring new knowledge to bear on the important work and discussions underway to develop our future transportation systems and land use policies. In Minnesota, this includes the work being carried out under the Statewide Transportation Plan and the Metro District Transportation System Plan by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT), and the Regional Development Framework and the Transportation Policy Plan by the Metropolitan Council.

This study will also develop new methodologies and findings that will attract national and international interest, as the TRG Study has. We believe a key contribution will be in the development of the next generation of performance measures to help transportation agencies and decision makers plan, manage, and track the performance of the transportation system.

Study components

The Access to Destinations  Study includes components related to both research and public involvement/outreach. These components are designed to complement each other, transferring the knowledge gained through focused research efforts to transportation professionals, policy makers, and the public through a series of reports, publications, and events.

• Research components
• Outreach components