More relevant than Gov. Tim Pawlenty's budget to this region's actual transportation needs is a report just out from the University of Minnesota.

"Market Choices and Fair Prices" isn't another puff of rhetoric from the left or right but real research that offers both a clear explanation for how the Twin Cities got into its traffic mess and a reasonable prescription for improving life on the move.

Curt Johnson, former Gov. Arne Carlson's Metropolitan Council chairman, did heroic work synthesizing 16 separate investigations from the University's Center for Transportation Studies (CTS). He and CTS Director Robert Johns offer highlights on the opposite page. Their conclusions ought to constitute a breakthrough in this state's long struggle over transportation.

Why a breakthrough? Because nowhere in the work can you find the obtrusive hand of the utopian planner. These findings are all based on market considerations, making this a report that conservatives should love and liberals should consider.

Take the study's first insight: Congestion is but a symptom of a development system that sponsors a spread-out growth pattern and near total dependence on autos. In other words, you get what the market encourages. If you motivate the economy to deliver relatively inexpensive gasoline and to provide housing that's cheaper the farther you drive from jobs and shopping, you get jammed highways. These will stay jammed if you fail to build parallel transit and fail to keep up road improvements.

Yes, the report recognizes that heavy traffic is a nice problem to have because it reflects growth and prosperity. Milwaukee and Kansas City would love to have the Twin Cities' traffic woes. But congestion will soon work against this market unless a strategy emerges. The study mentions three paths: The Atlanta model (auto dependence, traffic jams, sprawl); the Boston model (a congested place with transit options and compensating virtues), or the Chicago-Denver-Seattle hybrid (areas of low density and auto dependence combined with zones of higher density and transit choices).

This page will continue to advocate the third model, and the report seems to favor it. But to get there, two major policy changes are required: market choices and honest pricing.

We don't yet have honest pricing. Decisions to buy homes that require huge amounts of driving would not be so readily made if buyers confronted true costs. At present, 70 percent of those transportation-related costs are hidden in various taxes on property, car registration, "free" parking and so on. They are born by the public at large, no matter where people live or how little they drive. If new-home buyers at the suburban edge had to pay the full cost of adding the infrastructure that their driving requires -- if their homes and driving habits were no longer subsidized by residents of older areas -- people would soon demand a more efficient living pattern. Developers would suddenly offer more homes closer to jobs, shopping and transit. There would be incentives to drive fewer miles.

Raising the gasoline tax considerably might accomplish this. So might suburban toll roads and development fees, although we have serious doubts about those two options.

The report's second solution, market choices, is a slam-dunk. Consumers expect options in everything from breakfast cereal to movies. Yet for commuting, most have no attractive choice but to drive. It's an embarrassment that Minnesota funds transit at only half the level of comparable places. Several weeks ago, Rep. Lynne Osterman, R-New Hope, complained that a drive from the Capitol to a speaking engagement in west Bloomington took nearly two hours. Had Minnesota kept pace on transit, she would have had another choice.

The report's conclusion should be a clip-and-save for Minnesota's leaders: "Honest pricing of land development and transportation services, along with expanded choices about places to live and work, offer the best chances to improve the economic competitiveness, the mobility and overall livability of the region."

Copyright 2003 Star Tribune. Republished here with the permission of the Star Tribune, Minneapolis-St. Paul. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the written consent of the Star Tribune.