Building Our Way Out of Congestion? Highway Capacity for the Twin Cities

Principal Investigator(s):

Gary Davis, Professor, Civil, Environmental and Geo-Engineering

Project summary:

An active subject of debate in the Twin Cities concerns the extent to which new highway construction can accommodate the growth in travel demand expected over the next 20-25 years. This project will investigate the feasibility of using new highway construction as the sole accommodation to the Twin Cities projected growth. This will be accomplished by solving for a set of expansions of the capacities of highway links that minimizes construction cost while providing a guaranteed level of service to all travelers. The initial road network will be the current planning network used by the Metropolitan Council, the while the land use pattern and population will be the year 2020 forecasted values. A joint equilibrium trip distribution/trip assignment method developed by the PI in earlier work will be used to load trips onto the network.

Project details: