Principal Investigator(s):
David Levinson, Former U of M Professor, Civil, Environmental and Geo-Engineering
Co-Investigators:
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Yingling Fan, Associate Dean for Faculty, Humphrey School of Public Affairs
Project summary:
This research used 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 research built off of those findings by demonstrating the use of accessibility-based performance measures on the Twin Cities metropolitan area. This choice of performance measure also allowed 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. These travel time data were 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.