Modeling Household VMT from Accessibility

Project summary:

The 2023-24 Minnesota Legislature established a requirement that capacity expansion projects on Minnesota?s Trunk Highway (TH) system must be assessed to determine conformance with greenhouse gas emissions reduction and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) reduction targets established in the Statewide Multimodal Transportation Plan (SMTP) under section 174.03, subdivision 1a. A working group was appointed to identify needs for implementation. The working group report highlights in the first paragraph of findings in the Executive Summary, that ?Consistent regional and statewide modeling and analysis tools need to be developed? in order to support coordination and decision making between cities, counties, metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and MnDOT. Existing models of VMT analysis have drawbacks in cost, applicability, resolution, and flexibility, requiring exploration of new approaches. We propose to develop a VMT analysis based on a spatially explicit statistical model of household VMT, to bridge the gap between the calculator and the statewide travel demand model. Importantly, we base the estimation of local VMT on the supply of transportation opportunities at multiple scales, as measured by Accessibility. This has the advantage of integrating the local and regional transportation and land use patterns. It also allows for planned or proposed changes to the transportation network to be analyzed for change in VMT in response to the resulting accessibility change.