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This report contains a summary of the information detailed in four separate reports covering one project. The project examines the variation in people's need for and use of transport services by posing four research questions and answering them with transportation related data from the 1990 Census of Population and Housing. Questions posed are: 1) What is the socioeconomic profile of Minnesota's long-distance commuters? 2) How do Minnesota's counties and urban neighborhoods vary according to transport needs and use? 3) How can census data be used together with travel surveys to study the socioeconomic characteristics of travelers? and 4) How has interaction among the state's local labor markets changed in the last twenty years? The main findings are summarized in this report both verbally and graphically. References to the other four reports are given.

The lack of international tourists to Minnesota is due to many factors. Minnesota is mainly a regional destination, with the majority of tourists coming from within the state and adjacent states. The majority of visitors drive to arrive in Minnesota. Barriers preventing more international tourists from visiting Minnesota were investigated, using a variety of methods ranging from focus group analysis to a mail questionnaire targeting the German long haul market. Barriers were grouped into four categories: functional, perceptual, logistical, policy. The primary barrier identified is a private sector policy imposed by airlines. The decision not to allow stopover visits or open jaw tickets without a substantial change in the price of an air ticket works against spontaneous or planned short visits to relatively unknown destinations. Should this policy based access barrier be removed, a public/private partnership would be needed to promote stopovers in Minnesota.

A time series methodology is developed that differentiates the effects of highways on development from the effects of development on highways. This methodology uses pooled time-series and cross-sectional data on highway expenditures and county employment for the 87 Minnesota counties and all 9 economic sectors over the 25-year period 1957-1982 and includes classification of counties based on access, demographic and socioeconomic features. Results from vector autoregressions are tested against modern causality tests of Granger-Sims type. In the wholesale and natural-resource-based service sectors (e.g., tourism), increased highway expenditures result in long-term employment increases. While regionally very substantial, the impacts are distributional, i.e., the statewide impact is negligible. Government role is mostly reactive, increasing funding to counties whose economy is increasing, except in rural areas where government also attempts to stimulate declining economies. Funding decisions are highly sensitive to changes in the economy, especially in rural areas, and (as our evaluation of the Minnesota Department of Transportation [Mn/DOT] project selection process indicates) are primarily influenced by the District recommendation. Further, a new B/C project selection process is developed and tested on highway weight restriction policies in Northeast Minnesota. Both simulation with large 1/0 model and comparison with actual funding decisions made independently by Mn/DOT indicate agreement with our results. An extensive literature review and 175 references are included. This report consists of nine separate publications: an executive summary, the final report and seven appendices.

This is Appendix I for Report 89-11, "Transportation and Economic Development."

This is Appendix II of Report 89-11, "Transportation and Economic Development."

This is Appendix III to Report 89-11, "Transportation and Economic Development."

This is Appendix IV to Report 89-11, "Transportation and Economic Development."

This is Appendix V for Report 89-11, "Transportation and Economic Development."

This is Appendix VI for Report 89-11, "Transportation and Economic Development."

This is Appendix VII of Report 89-11, "Transportation and Economic Development."

Transportation systems, as integral parts of human settlements, reflect the societal structures and cultural ideologies influenced predominantly by the dominant race or class. In the absence of prioritizing the transportation needs of underserved communities, transportation systems may perpetuate systematic inequities. This study aims to address the inequities present in current transportation systems by conducting a comprehensive examination of the transportation experiences of individuals belonging to ten specific underserved communities. These communities include eight within the Twin Cities metropolitan region (Latinx, African American, Hmong, people with disabilities, immigrants, people living with HIV, single mothers, and single fathers), as well as two communities in the Greater Minnesota area (transitioning home residents in Fergus Falls and tribal members of the White Earth Nation). This research adopts a mixed-method approach, incorporating both qualitative interviews and quantitative smartphone-based travel behavior surveys. The findings reveal that each community faces distinct transportation barriers, alongside shared themes in transportation inequities such as inadequate public transportation, difficulties related to car use, and the impact of transportation on significant life outcomes. Recommendations for future research and practice are provided.

Transportation systems are designed to help people participate in activities distributed over space and time. Accessibility indicates the collective performance of land use and transportation systems and determines how well that complex system serves its residents. This research project comprises three main tasks. The first task reviews the literature on accessibility and its performance measures with an emphasis on measures that planners and decision makers can understand and replicate. The second task identifies the appropriate measures of accessibility, where accessibility measures are evaluated in terms of ease of understanding, accuracy and complexity, while the third task illustrates these accessibility measures. During this process a new accessibility measure named "Place Rank" is introduced as an accurate measure of accessibility. In addition, several previously-defined accessibility measures are reviewed and demonstrated in this report including Cumulative opportunity and gravity-based measures. The gravity-based measure is widely used in the literature yet cumulative opportunity tends to be easier to understand and interpret by the public, planners, and administrators. A major contribution of this research is the comparison of accessibility measures over time and among various modes. Effects of accessibility on home sales are also tested. Homebuyers pay a premium to live near jobs and away from competing workers. Accessibility promises to be a useful tool for monitoring the land use and transportation system, and assessing and valuing the benefits of proposed changes to either land use or networks.

This research, extending the Mn/DOT-funded project If They Come, Will You Build It, assesses the implications of existing trends on future network construction. It compares forecast networks (using models estimated on historical decisions developed with previous research) under alternative budget scenarios (trend, above trend, below trend), with networks constructed according to alternative sets of decision rules developed with Mn/DOT and Metropolitan Council staff. The comparison evaluates alternative futures using a set of performance measures to determine whether the network we would get in the absence of a change in policies (allowing historical policies to go forward) outperforms or underperforms the networks developed by applying suggested decision rules. This evaluation methodology enables new decision rules for network construction (building new links or widening existing links) to be tested. The research suggests a path beyond "business as usual."

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.

This project seeks to advance the state of knowledge of the relationship between transportation and economic development by investigating how firms in competitive industry clusters use transportation networks and what role the networks play in the formation and growth of these clusters. The approach combines quantitative and qualitative techniques to geographically identify competitive industry clusters and to investigate the role of transportation. The U.S. Cluster Mapping tool is used to identify competitive clusters by employment location quotients in 25 Minnesota metropolitan and micropolitan regions. Twelve competitive clusters were selected for further study, and in-depth interviews and site visits were conducted with businesses in each cluster to explore the competitive importance of different modes of transportation. These methods can yield valuable insights into how transportation functions as an input within competitive industry clusters and how it can inform economic development strategies tailored to certain locations and industries.

Using detailed travel surveys (the Travel Behavior Inventory) conducted by the Metropolitan Council of the Minneapolis/Saint Paul (Twin Cities) Region in Minnesota for 1990, 2000-2001, and 2010-2011, this report conducts an analysis of changes in travel behavior over time. Specifically looking at changes in travel duration, time, use, and accessibility; telecommuting and its relationship with travel and residential choices; transit service quality and transit use; effects of age and cohort; and changes in walking and bicycling. Much has changed in this period, including the size of the region, demographics, economics, technology, driver licensing, and preferences, examining in turn the effects of investment, development, and population change on behaviors for the Minneapolis-St. Paul region as a whole and for areas within the region. While this research cannot hope to untangle all of the contributing factors, it aims to increase understanding of what did happen, with some explanation of why. This will inform transportation engineers, planners, economists, analysts, and decision makers about the prospective effects of future changes to networks, land use, and demographics while also evaluating the effects of previous network investments.

This project provides case studies of the impact of transportation investments on local economies. We use multiple approaches to measure impacts since the effects of transportation projects can vary according to the size of a project and the size of the area under study, as well as other exogenous factors such as existing economic and demographic conditions. We measure effects on economic output and employment to estimate impacts of specific investments, and address issues of generative versus redistributive effects of investments, as well as identify specific economic sectors that might be disproportionately affected by such investments.

Quality of life (QOL) is a commonly used term. Defining QOL, however, is an ongoing challenge that experts often take on with minimal input from citizens. This groundbreaking research sought citizen input on what comprised QOL and what role transportation played in it. Further, this research explored in detail the important factors across the breadth of transportation and how the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) was performing on these important factors. The research encompassed three phases between 2010 and 2011: (1) an extensive literature review on QOL, (2) 24 focus groups that asked Minnesota's citizens about their QOL, and (3) a mail questionnaire about what matters in quality of life, transportation and their intersection. Eleven related quality of life factors emerged, including transportation: education, employment and finances, environment, housing, family, friends and neighbors, health, local amenities, recreation and entertainment, safety, spirituality/faith/ serenity, and transportation. Within transportation, seven important areas were identified that predicted satisfaction with MnDOT services: access, design, environmental issues, maintenance, mobility, safety and transparency. Results reveal that a) QOL is complex and transportation plays an important and consistent role in it across Minnesota; b) transportation is critical to QOL because it connects us to important destinations in aspects that matter most; and c) Minnesotans can readily identify what matters and how the state is performing within the breadth of transportation services.

Report #13 in the series: Access to Destinations Study. This report summarizes previous phases of the Access to Destinations project and applies the techniques developed over the course of the project to conduct an evaluation of accessibility in the Twin Cities for 2010. It also describes a methodology that can be used to implement future evaluations of accessibility.

This study uses accessibility as a performance measure to evaluate a matrix of future land use and network scenarios for planning purposes. Previous research has established the coevolution of transportation and land use, demonstrated the dependence of accessibility on both, and made the case for the use of accessibility measures as a planning tool. This study builds off of these findings by demonstrating the use of accessibility-based performance measures on the Twin Cities metropolitan area. This choice of performance measure also allows for transit and highway networks to be compared side-by-side. A zone-to-zone travel time matrix was computed using Stochastic User Equilibrium (SUE) assignment with travel time feedback to trip distribution. A database of schedules was used on the transit networks to assign transit routes. This travel time data was joined with the land use data from each scenario to obtain the employment, population, and labor accessibility from each traffic analysis zone (TAZ) within specified time ranges. Tables of person-weighed accessibility were computed for 20 minutes with zone population as the weight for employment accessibility and zone employment as the weight for population and labor accessibility. The person-weighted accessibility results were then used to evaluate the planning scenarios. The results show that centralized population and employment produce the highest accessibility across all networks.

Minnesota has declared ambitious climate goals aimed at significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the next thirty years, which it plans to accomplish partly through considerable reductions in the average vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per person. This will require close collaboration between local governments and the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT). This report presents the findings of a brief field scan conducted in early 2023 to understand relevant initiatives, opportunities, and challenges experienced by local communities throughout Minnesota. It involved a review of local plans and documents, a survey distributed among local agencies across the state, and targeted follow-up interviews. Results indicate that while many local organizations have expressed an interest in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, few focus explicitly on transportation emissions and even fewer of those see VMT reduction as a major strategy for meeting those goals. Nonetheless, there are organizations that are interested in the types of policies and investments that could reduce overall driving and help meet ambitious climate goals, often because they support local economic goals. This presents opportunities to realign VMT-reduction strategies with local needs and for MnDOT to provide local support in the form of funding, technical assistance, data resources, and additional guidance.

This Technical Summary pertains to Report 2012-34, “Access to Destinations: Annual Accessibility Measure for the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area,” published November 2012.

This Technical Summary pertains to Report 2015-02, “Transportation Planning to Support Economic Development: An Exploratory Study of Competitive Industry Clusters and Transportation in Minnesota,” published January 2015.

This Technical Summary pertains to Report 2006-36, “Beyond Business as Usual: Ensuring the Network We Want Is the Network We Get,” published September 2006.

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 2013-03, “Case Studies of Transportation Investment to Identify the Impacts on the Local and State Economy,” published January 2013.

This Technical Summary pertains to Report 2013-05, “Quality of Life: Assessment for Transpor-tation Performance Measures,” published January 2013.

This Technical Summary pertains to Report 2015-23, “Travel Behavior Over Time,” published June 2015.

This Technical Summary pertains to Report 2012-05, “Using Twin Cities Destinations and Their Accessibility as a Multimodal Planning Tool,” published February 2012.

The Fourth Northstar Workshop, "Transportation For Minnesota: How and How Much? What is The Transportation Future To Keep Minnesota Moving?" was held at the Thunderbird Motel in Bloomington, Minnesota, on December 1 and 2, 1987. It was attended by approximately 150 people drawn from Mn/DOT, other state departments, the Minnesota Legislature, county and municipal agencies, chambers of commerce, developers, and industry. The format of the workshop was one and one-half days of presentations of papers by individuals on subjects which had been assigned to them, with limited questions and discussion after each one. These presentations were followed by group discussions for which the attendees were divided into six groups. Reports of these discussions were made to the full conference by group leaders and a wrap-up was then made by Deputy Commissioner Doug Differt. Following the workshop. Transportation Commissioner Leonard W. Levine created a special action committee to follow up on these recommendations. The proceedings contains transcripts of the presentations made by the conference speakers and discussion group speakers, and also the wrap-up.