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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.

This Appendix relates to Transportation Synthesis Report 2401, Measuring the Livability Framework, published February 2024.

Previous research conducted by the Design Center for American Urban Landscape at the University of Minnesota suggests a need to develop a hierarchical network of arterials that would accommodate contemporary and future activity and movement patterns in suburban areas. This research project investigated the interaction between road section design and adjacent site design by applying livable community principles and developing a set of design criteria that would guide coordination of land use and transportation planning. The research hypothesized a need for a minimum of three roadway prototypes, district planning capabilities, and an integrated land use and transportation planning approach. Research findings indicate that a hierarchical network is feasible under the following circumstances: The district network assumes arterial segments designed at different speeds; Urban design performance criteria are used at the beginning of the planning process to establish quantitative measures; Spacing of controlled intersections corresponds to road speed design; Urban design templates, keyed to road design speed, are used to guide design of areas adjacent to the intersections; The existing development context becomes the basis for balancing activity and moment and for phasing change in the built environment.

What would it take to build our way out of congestion in the Twin Cities? As part of this research project, researchers identified a method to answer that question and found a minimal set of highway capacity expansions that would accommodate future travel demand and guarantee mobility. The problem of identifying a set of capacity expansions that are in some sense optimal, while accounting for traveler reaction, is known as a network design problem. A literature review reveals numerous formulations and solution algorithms over the last three decades, but the problem of implementing these for large-scale networks has remained a challenge. This project presents a solution procedure that incorporates the capacity expansion as a modified step in the Method Successive Averages, providing an efficient algorithm capable of solving realistic problems of real-world complexity. Application of this method addresses the network design problem for the freeway system of the Twin Cities by providing a lower bound on the extent to which physical expansion of highway capacity can be used to accommodate future growth. The solution estimates that adding 1,844 lane-kilometers, or 1,146 lane-miles, would be needed to accommodate the demand predicted for the year 2020.

This report develops several models of historical roadway improvements in the Twin Cities metro area. Planners respond to, and try to shape, demand by recommending investments in new infrastructure and changes in public policy. Sometimes capacity is added to existing facilities. Other times, building new roads is the response. As a result of this research, the ways in which current network expansion or contraction decisions alter the choices of future decisionmakers has become clearer. This research develops a theoretical framework, constructs a comprehensive time series database describing network investment, utilization and capacity, estimates several statistical models, and interprets the results to guide planning.

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.

Report #1 in the Series: Local and Regional Planning, Management, Design and Evaluation of Advanced Transportation Technologies.

Report #2 in the Series: Local and Regional Planning, Management, Design and Evaluation of Advanced Transportation Technologies.

The purpose of this project was to understand why public involvement in transportation project planning goes badly, and to determine how the process could be modified to reduce negative outcomes. The project examines these issues by studying public involvement efforts. The project examines how the potential for conflict can be anticipated. A local project had characteristics of having been well run with good intentions, of having been plagued by conflict, and of being documented in a neighborhood newspaper. It was the primary source of reasons why public involvement can turn out badly and was contrasted with three other projects that were more successful with their public involvement. A new model is proposed in this report. The model proposes that conflict can derive from any or all of five independent dimensions, each with its own level of intensity or intractability: size and distribution of local benefits or costs; disagreement about the nature and importance of local impacts; ability to accurately define and engage relevant stakeholders; perceived legitimacy of the project; and degree of ideological issues. There are two key conclusions. First, situations with serious conflict are different from the typical public involvement effort; they require different tools and tactics built around the specific nature of the conflict. The second major finding is that "conflict" is not a standard problem to answer with a single solution, but each conflict does not have to be approached individually.

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."