Access to Destinations: Refining Methods for Calculating Non-Auto Travel Times

Project summary:

The objective of this research was to generate and refine methodologies for calculating non-auto (transit, bicycle, walking) travel times between origins and destinations within the Twin Cities. When married with detailed measures of land use activity, these derived travel times can then be used as required input parameters to calculate the accessibility to destinations within the metropolitan area using differing modes of transportation.

Unique networks for each mode were developed, accounting for the presence of special facilities such as pedestrian or bicycle trails and on-street bike lanes. A statistical model was estimated to identify the influence of special bicycle facilities on travel speeds, using GPS data collected from bicyclists in a real-world setting. These methods were demonstrated with an application to a section of the Twin Cities metropolitan region encompassing parts of the cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Bloomington.

The output of the application of these methods is a set of maps depicting travel sheds from various locations within the study area. The data are displayed for three points in time: 1995, 2000, and 2005. Changes to these travel sheds over time are demonstrated with maps that show the difference in travel time between each set of origins and destinations for each pair of years. The research concludes with some suggestions about the uses of the travel time data, such as the calculation of multimodal, multipurpose measures of accessibility.