Measuring Accessibility by Automobile

Principal Investigator:

David Levinson, Associate Professor, Civil Engineering

Sponsor:

Minnesota Department of Transportation

Status:

Active

Project Summary:

The goal of the proposed research is to develop accessibility measures for the Twin Cities region during the periods between 1995 and 2005. This will be done in two parts. The first will utilize travel time estimations on arterials and freeways from previous projects as an input to identify the feasible routes (and their travel times) between origin and destination pairs in the region. This will be done through determination of departure timebased route travel times, and will integrate such data with land use information stored in a geographic information system. The second part will include generation of the accessibility measures for the three time periods. Accessibility measures include cumulative opportunity, gravity-based, and place rank measures that were tested in previous research. The final product of this research project will be a comprehensive evaluation of accessibility in the Twin Cities region, which can help in operational planning and in public involvement activities of transportation agencies to ascertain how investments, transportation strategies, market conditions, and land use policies affect the performance of the transportation-land use system.