Passenger and Freight Travel Demand

Project summary:

This study will evaluate the nature of demand for transportation services in the Twin Cities and how it influences and is influenced by land use. The project will include documenting the historical link between transportation and land use, identifying traveler objectives and sources of demand, evaluating demand projections, and performing a preliminary study of some travel management options. This is intended as the first year of a two or three-year project, with later years devoted to more detailed study of issues that prove to be especially important or poorly understood. An important innovation will be the study of travel demand from the "economic" point of view of users' objectives and constraints. This technique will make it possible to understand more clearly how demand responds to different policies, and to evaluate more directly how well different systems or modes of travel satisfy the needs of users. The use of ex post measures of demand such as vehicle miles traveled is not adequate for evaluative purposes because these numbers merely describe behavior without providing any means for evaluating user satisfaction. The knowledge gained by this study will be useful to policy makers in predicting the likely effects of policies, and in evaluating the desirability of different options. It will also be helpful in educating the public about the process by which a policy produces certain results, and why some policies are preferred over others.