Search Content

This paper looks at alternatives for promoting and strengthening multimodal transportation in rural and small urban areas. It outlines 65 different innovative activities around the United States that have been undertaken to promote multimodalism in rural areas and smaller towns. These activities are grouped into six categories: improving transit options; accommodating alternative vehicles; supporting pedestrian and bicycle travel; multimodal land use planning; the use of financial incentives to promote multimodal land use development; and other alternatives that do not fit in these five categories. From this, six case studies have been developed. These case studies include retrofitting sidewalks in Olympia Washington: the network of interurban transit options in North Dakota; providing mileage reimbursement for seniors arranging their own rides in Mesa Arizona; the State of Oregon's "Main Street as a Highway" guidance for integrating highways into the fabric of smaller towns; the use to transportation impact fees to fund transportation infrastructure, including concurrency fees, development fees and special district fees; and a "Complete Streets" project in Clinton, Iowa.

Investigators created a manual to help MnDOT and local agencies implement counting programs, which can be used to evaluate safety and use of bicycle and pedestrian facilities. The first edition of this manual was published as a draft version. The final version is Report 2017-03.

The Minnesota Bicycle and Pedestrian Counting Initiative: Implementation Study reports results from the second in a series of three MnDOT projects to foster non-motorized traffic monitoring. The objectives were to install and validate permanent automated sensors, use portable sensors for short duration counts, develop models for extrapolating counts, and integrate continuous counts into MnDOT traffic monitoring databases. Commercially available sensors, including inductive loops, integrated inductive loops and passive infrared, pneumatic tubes, and radio beams, were installed both as permanent monitor sites and used for short-duration counts at a variety of locations in cities, suburbs, and small towns across Minnesota. All sensors tested in the study produced reasonably accurate measures of bicycle and pedestrian traffic. Most sensors undercounted because of their inability to distinguish and count bicyclists or pedestrians passing simultaneously. Accuracy varied with technology, care and configuration of deployment, maintenance, and analytic methods. Bicycle and pedestrian traffic volumes varied greatly across locations, with highest volumes being on multiuse trails in urban areas. FHWA protocols were used to estimate annual average daily traffic and miles traveled on an 80-mile multiuse trail network in Minneapolis. Project findings were incorporated in a new MnDOT guidance document, "DRAFT Bicycle and Pedestrian Data Collection Manual" used in statewide training workshops. A major challenge in implementing bicycle and pedestrian traffic monitoring is data management. Years will be required to institutionalize bicycle and pedestrian traffic successfully.

This Technical Summary pertains to Report 2014-42, “Rural and Small Urban Multimodal Alternatives for Minnesota,” published November 2014.

This Technical Summary pertains to Report 2015-33, “Draft Bicycle and Pedestrian Data Collection Manual,” published July 2015, and Report 2015-34, “The Minnesota Bicycle and Pedestrian Counting Initiative: Implementation Study,” published June 2015.