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The University of Minnesota's Center for Transportation Studies and MnDOT have a Blog! Crossroads | A Minnesota transportation research blog

"Crossroads is a collaborative effort between MnDOT Research Services and the University of Minnesota's Center for Transportation Studies. This jointly produced blog is devoted to highlighting the latest news and events in transportation research and innovation in Minnesota."

If you have been following this blog, you may have detected a theme, I don't like the public wasting money on un-needed infrastructure. Of course no-one endorses "wasting" money, we just disagree what is wasteful and what is an investment.

I think the answer is obvious in retrospect. A successful investment had a positive "return on investment" at or above market interest rates. An unsuccessful investment (or waste) had a negative return on investment. Projects with positive but below market rates of return sit in an analytical purgatory.

In prospect, I think I can assess forecasts accurately, and project advocates are not to be trusted for a variety of well-understood reasons ranging from optimism bias to strategic misrepresentation. Unfortunately, other people also think they can assess forecasts accurately, even if we know they can't. If we had better mechanisms for requiring forecasters to be more accurate, we could mitigate these problems.

When these projects are small, it is not terribly important. The analysis of benefits and costs should not be costlier than than the benefits from the analysis (i.e. the difference in total welfare from a build/no build or a build this vs. build that decision). But when the project proponents ask for hundreds of millions of dollars (or more), we should be paying more attention.

A large number of projects seems to fall in the category of what I will dub "Mostly Empty Syndrome". MES projects are infrastructure that are underutilized. Mostly they are not underutilized by design, but by mis-forecast. There are facilities however, like NFL stadiums, that are in fact underutilized by design, with lots of marginal events schedule to mitigate the grossness of the structure.

These are projects that serve purported needs, but those needs don't materialize. Or they just are insufficient to justify the cost. Or they can be met in a different way. A few examples are listed below:

• Vikings Stadium - As I suggested before, they really only need to play in a TV studio. More importantly, the facility is unused or underutilized 355 days a year. The worst aspect is that they could not somehow figure out a way to share the stadium with the college team at a university that is adjacent to the stadium site.
• Stillwater Bridge - The old bridge required a replacement. The new bridge is overkill for the actual demands on the road.
• SPUD - It is basically slated to serve 350 train passengers a day, and a few buses until lots of speculative rail lines are opened.
• Northstar - Some forecasts greatly over-estimated benefits.
• Maryland's Inter-County Connector is failing to realize forecasts of demand.

There are some counter-examples perhaps, projects that were long considered white elephants, though eventually demand caught up with supply. Dulles Airport meets this criterion. That still does not mean it was a good idea to build it when it was built, even if it is heavily used today. The 20 years of underutilization are fixed capital that could have been better spent in some other way.

There are other counter-examples, projects that were expected to fail (by someone, though not by proponents) that exceeded expectations. The Pennsylvania Turnpike comes to mind.

What connects MES projects?

1. I believe history will show that they are designed and pushed through by politicians serving narrow interests rather than by market demands or public sentiment. That is, they are generated by top-down rather than bottom-up processes.
2. They are large and require special treatment.
3. They are backward looking, built near, at, or past the maturity of the technology they represent. Air travel was still growing when Dulles was built, and the market grew into its capacity there. Auto travel was still early in its cycle when the Pennsylvania Turnpike was built. In contrast we now have peak travel, long ago passed peak railway, and are hopefully at peak football.

I was at a public forum in Hinckley, Minnesota last night (home of the world-famous Grand Casino), giving a talk on the Northern Lights Express (NLX). The crowd was, in the immortal words of Grampa Simpson "Agin' it". My slides are here, though readers of the blog have seen most of the material before.

It was fun, thanks to the many organizers from Pine County.

Just posted at streets.mn The Yard at Downtown East:

"In a veritable bacchanalia of developments, we have seen three major inter-related activities in Minneapolis’s Downtown East:" [Washington Avenue, The Yard, and The Stadium]

My thoughts on the Saint Paul Union Depot at Streets.MN: SPUD :

"We entered the dimly authentically-lit Saint Paul Union Depot (SPUD), a large but not magnificent space. A train station with no trains. The restoration is nice, and I am sure a better space than the restorers found it in, but the original structure was really nothing special at all. Having only been to the front of the station previously (the acoustically challenged headhouse), I was actually disappointed at the rest of it given how much fuss and money have been expended on the project."

I think the most amazing thing is seeing the path of the Minneapolis tornado appear in 2011

Congratulations to soon to be Dr. Carlos Carrion (shown in the center of the picture, between alums Nebiyou Tilahun and Pavithra Parthasarthi), who recently defended his Ph.D. Thesis "Travel Time Perception Errors: Causes and Consequences" (a draft of which is linked). He is working as a post-doctoral researcher at MIT/SMART in Singapore.

Travel Time Perception Errors: Causes and Consequences

Abstract:

This research investigates the causes, and consequences behind travel time perception. Travel times are experienced. Thus, travelers estimate the travel time through their own perception. This is the underlying reason behind the mismatch between travel times as reported by a traveler (subjective travel time distribution) and travel times as measured from a device (e.g. loop detector or GPS navigation device; objective travel time distribution) in collected data. It is reasonable that the relationship between subjective travel times and objective travel times may be expressed mathematically as: Ts = To + ξ. Ts is a random variable associated with the probability density given by the subjective travel time distribution. To is a random variable associated with the probability density given by the objective travel time distribution. The variable ξ is the random perception error also associated with its own probability density. Thus, it is clear that travelers may overestimate or underestimate the measured travel times, and this is likely to influence their decisions unless E(ξ) = 0, and Var(ξ) ≈ 0. In other words, travelers are “optimizing” (i.e. executing decisions) according to their own divergent views of the objective travel time distribution.

This dissertation contributes novel results to the following areas of transportation research: travel time perception; valuation of travel time; and route choice modeling. This study presents a systematic identification of factors that lead to perception errors of travel time. In addition, the factors are related to similar factors on time perception research in psychology. These factors are included in econometric models to study their influence on travel time perception, and also identify which of these factors lead to overestimation or underestimation of travel times. These econometric models are estimated on data collected from commuters recruited from a previous research study in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region (Carrion and Levinson, 2012a, Zhu, 2010). The data (surveys, and Global Positioning System [GPS] points) consists of work trips (from home to work, and from work to home) of subjects. For these work trips, the subjects’ self-reported travel times, and the subjects’ travel times measured by GPS devices were collected. Furthermore, this dissertation provides the first empirical results that highlight the influence of perception errors in the valuation of travel time, and in the dynamic behavior of travelers’ route choices. Last but not least important, this dissertation presents the most comprehensive literature review of the value of travel time reliability written to date.

The League of Minnesota Cities writes:

Briefing paper---2013 Minnesota cities and street improvement districts League position

The League supports HF 745 (Erhardt, DFL-Edina) and SF 607 (Carlson, DFL-Eagan), legislation that would allow cities to create street improvement districts. This authority would allow cities to collect fees from property owners within a district to fund municipal street maintenance, construction, reconstruction, and facility upgrades. If enacted, this legislation would provide cities with an additional tool to build and maintain city streets.

Sounds like a good idea to me. To be fair, there are opponents. The stated opposition seems odd. They oppose this tool because it is not voter approved, yet I don't ever recall voting on property tax hikes, or sales taxes for stadia which are imposed on me. The real opposition is because it shifts the burden from one class of taxpayers to another, hopefully so that it is more closely aligned with benefits.

At any rate, our research on the similar Transportation Utility Fees is:

• Junge, Jason and David Levinson (2012) Prospects for transportation utility fees. Journal of Transport and Land Use 5(1) pp. 33-47

Drew Kerr has a pay-walled article at Finance & Commerce here.

Projections around the proposed intercity railway "Northern Lights Express (NLX)" line from Duluth to Twin Cities are presented below. The first two columns of data are from the Statewide Rail plan, funded by MnDOT, prepared by Cambridge Systematics (lead). The last column is from the recent draft Environmental Assessment by USDOT, MnDOT and WisDOT

I was asked to write an opinion piece for The Pine City Pioneer: Who will pay if NLX fails? in response to one put forward by project consultant Alexander Metcalf of TEMS:

"TEMS, the consultant hired to advocate for the project, asserts that revenue will exceed operating costs at higher speeds. I agree that both revenue and costs will increase with speed, whether one increases faster than the other is an empirical question on which forecasts are highly questionable for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is lack of existing service on which to base such assumptions. Many have suggested the Downeaster is the most comparable market.

The Downeaster already carried 300,000 riders in 2005 and was in fact forecast to carry 625,000 passengers between Boston and Portland in 2015, so, [the fact] that it exceeds 525,000 riders in 2012 after a major investment is hardly testament to it beating targets. http://www.edrgroup.com/pdf/report-downeaster-final.pdf

More important is to compare the structure of the markets. Boston and Portland are less than 100 miles apart. Duluth is 137 miles from Minneapolis, so you would expect more trips between Boston and Portland if the sizes of the city pairs were equal. They are not.

The population of metropolitan Portland, Maine (516,000) exceeds that of Duluth (280,000); while the metropolitan Boston combined statistical area (7.6 million) remains larger than the Twin Cities (3.6 million). The number of trips between two places is a product of their sizes and inversely proportional to the travel time. On a population basis alone we expect the Boston to Portland market to have almost four times as many trips as Minneapolis to Duluth.

Of course metropolitan Boston has much greater transit use (12.2 percent) than Minneapolis (4.7 percent), and much better connections so that will also tend to increase ridership for the Downeaster above what the NLX should expect.
Unfortunately, U.S. experience with passenger rail for the past 50 years suggests the forecasts are optimistically biased in favor of the project in order to increase the likelihood they will be funded. The question at hand is will the project in fact recover its operating and capital costs?

We have no evidence it will. TEMS admits that Amtrak considers state revenue as income. A subsidy is a subsidy whether it comes from the federal, state, or local government. So even if the Northeast Corridor were operationally profitable (conveniently forgetting capital costs, which need to be paid somehow), that is not evidence any other particular route would be. Just because it pays its utilities (operating costs) doesn’t mean it pays its mortgage (capital costs). Who will pay if the NLX fails to meet revenue hopes?"

From an anonymous source:

The Ramsey Star bus service had 115 park-and-ride users in fall 2012, two months before the Ramsey Station opened.

2012 ANNUAL REGIONAL PARK-AND-RIDE SYSTEM REPORT

Meaning of course that most commuter rail riders are not new, so your
denominator perhaps should only be 15 new riders or $880,000 per rider!

Drew Kerr at Working on the railroad reports:

"A new $13.2 million station in Ramsey also opened in early November, and is seeing an average of 130 weekday boardings."

So we have the capital cost of a commuter rail station at $100,000 per passenger. Note this is more than a car or even a simple house. The park and ride ramp ("ramp" is midwestern for "garage") has 800 free parking spaces.

Of course if they had the anticipated 800 daily passengers (assuming 1 passenger per vehicle, since this is Amerucah, and one vehicle per space, since why build excess), then the capital cost would be a mere $16,500 per passenger. How much do we spend per bus passenger at most bus stops? Is it even $1?

Today I saw one bus unable to get up a hill and one crash, both due to weather conditions (I got some video of the bus after its failure to climb the hill, but none of the crash, which was a minor fender-bender with some grill damage to the offending vehicle with apparently no injuries). Meetings are canceled left and right. My son's school was canceled. My daughter's school (a different school in the same building) was not. Welcome to Meteorological Spring.

More on Why we become such bad drivers when it snows at Streets.MN

Now at streets.mn: Just-in-time consumption: Does the `pint of milk test’ hold water?:

"As with stores, houses too are getting larger over the long run. New suburban homes have more space to store goods in-house. While urban residents export storage to common stores, suburban residents more likely to have second freezers, have more space to store stuff."

This is an update from a post first published in 2007.

At streets.mn I note that the Twin Cities is Fastest Metropolitan Area in the United States (outside of California)

The Webcast for Accessibility Now and in the Future is now available. (Andrew Owen presented it at CTS yesterday). The presentation is also available for download.

The full research reports are:

• Annual Accessibility Measure for the Twin Cities Metropolitan Region, and
• Using Twin Cities Destinations and their Accessibility as a Multimodal Planning Tool

In the absence of significant global warming, Minnesotans still need to contend with ice on the sidewalks (to be clear, in the presence of significant global warming, we would have other problems; and in the presence of significant global cooling, we would face snow and glaciers rather than freezing rain and ice).

My own house suffers this problem, despite (or because of) snow clearance, ice re-forms on the sidewalks and steps, or freezing rain falls on the cleared sidewalks, making them slick, rather than on snow-covered sidewalks, making them crunchy. Further, water drips from the house and gutters because of ice dams, and then freezes on the ground.

My alma mater, Georgia Tech, while not typically subject to much snow or ice, has many sidewalks just above steam-heat pipes, which would clear those sidewalks pretty readily in most conditions. The University of Minnesota does a pretty good job with snow clearance, all things considered, using a lot of labor and snow clearance machines in the process.

Ice clearance is hard in this freeze-melt cycle, especially when the water has no where to drain because (1) the sidewalks are convex (along either width or length), (2) the boulevards are covered in snow creating no place for run off to go and creating a source for new melted water, (3) the storm drains are covered in snow, and (4) the ground is still frozen and/or the soil above the freeze line is super-saturated.

I see a lot of attention to ice-free roads, and very little for ice-free sidewalks. This would greatly enhance walkability, reduce the likelihood of severe injury, and increase the number of pedestrians.

There are a variety of ways to address icy sidewalks:

• Mechanical: clearing sidewalks with shovels and pick-axes and snow-bots.
• Friction: Sand, Grit, Gravel make the ice more walkable (by increasing friction);
• Chemical: Salt (reduces ice via melting);
• Radiant: heated sidewalks (using a variety of techniques);
• Protection: covered sidewalks; and

If we consider the cost of an icy sidewalk equal to the probability of a fall multiplied by the cost of a fall, multiplied by the number of people who face that probability per day, times the number of days the sidewalk is icy, we can get a sense of the amount we should invest to avoid the ice.

Let's say I fall once a year on the ice (typical), after traveling 2.6 km * 2 times a day * 10 ice days = 52 km. My fall rate: is 1 fall per 52 km of ice.

For a house with 10 m of frontage, with 100 pedestrians a day, it gets 1 km of pedestrian traffic per day. Once every 52 icy days, it will see someone fall.

The cost of a fall is unclear, since most falls are unreported. For reported falls which require medical care, the estimate is on the order of $10,000. Let's assume 10% of falls require medical attention, meaning the average cost per fall is $1,000.

This implies that every 52 icy days (once every 5.2 years if there are 10 icy days per year), each house with icy sidewalks imposes $1,000 in costs. In that case, if we want to minimize social costs, we should be willing to invest $19 day in effective ice clearance. This is about an hour of labor (or two hours of undergraduate labor) to operate simple machines plus some cheap (Friction or Chemical based) treatments). Unfortunately, I am unclear whether $19/day is effective.

We could add delay costs, due to people walking slower on ice, which I estimate to be about a 10% reduction in walking speed. With a travel speed typically of 1.44 m/s, we might decrease that to 1.3 m/s. So instead of the 100 pedestrians taking 7 seconds each to walk in front of the house, they are taking 7.7 seconds. That is 70 person-seconds per day, which has an economic value of (@ $15/hour) of $0.30 per day, two orders of magnitude lower than the fall costs, and so not really worth discussing further.

But can we prevent the ice from forming?

For $1000 every 5.2 years, we get $5000 for a 26 year expected life of a capital investment. If we can make a capital investment of less than $5000 to eliminate falls on our public sidewalk, it would be socially worthwhile.

The cost of heating sidewalks is about $20 per square foot (or about $215 per square meter). A 10 meter by 2 meter sidewalk is 20 meters square, giving us a cost of $4305.

We must consider operating costs, which are estimated at $.60/hour. If it is operating 240 hours per year (this is a guess, I don't know how long it needs to operate to keep the sidewalk ice free), this is $144 year. (You might run it to melt snow, but that has fewer benefits, just avoiding shoveling, not reduced falling in this simple model, so I don't consider that). $144 per year is $3744 over 26 years (no discounting), so is a large fraction of the capital costs.

Unfortunately, $4305+$3744 > $5000, so 100 pedestrians is not enough to justify heating. However 160 pedestrians would be a break-even point.

Covering the sidewalks (200m of roofing) could cost $80/square foot ($860/square meter). This lasts 15 years. For 20 square meters, this costs $17,200, well out of range for our residential sidewalk if the only objective is ice reduction, especially since it only lasts 15 years. It might have other benefits, such as reducing our exposure to nature and street-life though.

Policy recommendation: Use student labor to clear sidewalks with low pedestrian flows. Heat sidewalks which have high pedestrian flows. Cover sidewalks with very high pedestrian flows.

Yes, I did fall this year. This post was written between my vertical and horizontal positions, so I apologize in advance for its rushed nature.

Brendon Slotterback responds to Andrew Owen's post yesterday at Street.MN at Net Density on a Department of Accessibility :

"What if instead of a Department of Transportation we had a Department of Accessibility and it’s mission was to improve accessibility while meeting environmental standards, building resilient systems, and being economically viable? I bet it would look at lot different than our current DOTs (hint: it would do a lot more with land use)."

I think this compares favorably against Richard Florida's proposal for a Department of Cities.

The Department of Accessibility is conceived of as at the state (or metropolitan) level, where the decision making for transportation does (and should) occur and where decision making for land use might occur (now it is mostly local). In contrast, the Department of Cities is a federal initiative, without a clear reason as to why Cities (or any specific places) are a federal responsibility (since the benefits of improving any given city are almost all local).

Andrew Owen writes at Streets.MN : I Love Accessibility :

"That, in a nutshell, is accessibility. It combines the value that we get from travel with the cost of making the trip. I love accessibility because it neatly encapsulates what I consider to be the fundamental purpose of transportation systems: providing ways for people to get to places they want to reach, at costs they are willing to pay."

Now at streets.mn, my "Valentine's Week" entry: I Love My Commute :

"Further, the shortest path route allows me to see the traffic on I-94 twice, so I can check on the status of bottlenecks (which I realize is a highly idiosyncratic reason to like one’s commute, but it’s a professional hazard)."

And notice (you cannot fail) the new (temporary) background.

To legally ride the LRT in Minneapolis, you need to buy a ticket, or tap in with your Go-To card. I recently made a trip to DC via LRT (at Franklin Avenue) (and a bus, and an airport shuttle, and an airplane, and a Metrorail train, and of course, on foot), and was anticipating having to tap the Go-To card reader at the middle of the station where it had been since 2004. Lo and behold, when I arrived, the reader was at the station entrance, where it should be, and not in the middle where it had been, where I might spend an extra 15 seconds walking and miss the train. I don't know when this change took place, but it is the kind of attention to operational detail and consideration of the customer's time that is important. So thank you unnamed persons at MetroTransit who ordered the Go-To card reader moved, or added another one.

Recently Published:

• Huang, Arthur and David Levinson (2013) The structure and evolution of a skyway network The European Physical Journal: Special Topics January 2013, Volume 215, Issue 1, pp 123-134 [download]

We study the structure and evolution of the downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota skyway network. Developed by private building-owners, the network evolved from tree-like to grid-like over the course of 50 years. We find that decentralized forces with the goal of maximizing individual buildings’ profitability shaped the network. Our analysis shows that a building with greater office size, a sign of greater accessibility, was more likely to be connected earlier. The distribution of existing skyway segments is found to follow a power-law function of the average degree, closeness, and eigenvector centralities of the vertices. We further explain and model the evolutionary process using an agent-based model. The simulation results suggest that the model replicates the network structure and its evolutionary process.

Recently published:

• Owen, Andrew and Levinson, David (2012) Access to Destinations: Annual Accessibility Measure for the Twin Cities Metropolitan Region. Minnesota Department of Transportation

"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 metropolitan region for 2010. It describes a methodology that can be used to implement future evaluations of accessibility, including a discussion of the development and use of software tools created for this evaluation. The goal of the 2010 accessibility evaluation is twofold: it seeks both to generate an accurate representation of accessibility in 2010, and to identify data sources, methods, and metrics that can be used in future evaluations. The current focus on establishing replicable data sources and methodology in some cases recommends or requires changes from those used in previous Access to Destinations research. In particular, it is important to standardize data sources and parameters to ensure comparability between multiple evaluations over time. This evaluation recommends data sources and methodology that provide a good representation of actual conditions, that are based on measurements rather than models that provide a reasonable expectation of continuity in the future and that are usable with a minimum of manual processing and technical expertise."

The Twin Cities should have something like Walk London (only better)

In London you have:

Signage:
The route is indicated on the ground by a variety of signs and waymarks, which are very similar to those of the London Loop. In open spaces they consist mostly of a simple white disc, mounted on wooden posts and containing a directional arrow with the Big Ben logo in blue and text in green (but note that in Richmond black replaces green due to local conservation area considerations). A word of warning: the arrow's direction may not be clear until you are close up. It is easy to assume that it points ahead, but it may turn - look closely before continuing.

On streets the posts are replaced by larger aluminium signs strapped to lampposts and other street furniture, and additionally carry a walking man symbol. On link routes to stations the word 'link' is incorporated into the logo. At major focal points you will also meet tall green and white signposts that give distances to three points in either direction. Some of these locations may also have the big, round-topped information boards.

And of course, they should be contiguous.

The best I can find is this, which helps me if I am a planner, but not a pedestrian. At Bike Walk Twin Cities, which feels like , let's be honest, Bike Bike Twin Cities, the "maps" link has links to 8 different bike maps on their maps page, only one of which is really only for hiking too, and that is for outstate. The Walking maps page leads me to the useless City of Minneapolis page, the route planner from Metro Transit, and two Skyway maps.

Maybe there is some other resource I am missing. Maybe someone has a grant to do this. Maybe someone had a grant to do this, but didn't do it.

Now at streets.mn How a chance encounter in St. Paul almost prevented World War II :

"While staying in St. Paul, Minnesota, Zeppelin encountered a fellow German who had served for the Union inflating a hot-air balloon. It was here Count Zeppelin first went airborne in 1863. The rest, as the say, is history."

Now @ Streets.MN : In praise of contiguity :

"After seeing other places throughout the world, notably Toronto, London, Manhattan, any continental European city, even Washington DC, I believe the problem with making Minneapolis a first rate pedestrian city is the lack of contiguity. There are some really good walkable sections, but they are not connected well (or at all)."

Andrew has a nice, long-awaited post unlocking the Twin Cities street alphabets @ streets.mn: When You Plan, You Begin With A B C :

"I was driving through Uptown with a friend in 2004 when it hit me: these streets are in alphabetical order! As a visitor I was impressed by such orderliness; a month later I moved to Minneapolis (not because of the street names—or at least, not entirely because of them). I learned about the second alphabet while visiting friends in Linden Hills, but it wasn’t until several years later than some random Google Maps browsing revealed not two but eight (okay, maybe just 7 and 1/13th) sequences of alphabetically-ordered street names extending west from Aldrich. By this time I also knew of the presidential sequence in northeast Minneapolis, and more map browsing revealed some others."

Friday saw two reports drop:

Minnesota Transportation Finance Advisory Committee
Summary Report and Recommendations

In short, what transportation will cost

and

The Itasca Project's Regional Transit System: Return on Investment Assessment (Executive Summary)

What spending money on new transit infrastructure in the Metro area will get us.

[I was on the Technical Advisory Committee of the latter report, which constitutes neither endorsement nor lack thereof. The final technical report has not dropped as far as I can tell.]

Now @ streets.mn Won’t you take me to … Dinkytown :

"Dinkytown, immortalized in the eponymous 1980 Lipps Inc. hit song, is the neighborhood just north of the University of Minnesota."

Mike Spack vs. ITE: Why does the Institute of Transportation Engineers exist? 10 Ideas for Big Changes. See his post for the list.

I am disappointed Mike took down his spreadsheet, though I understand why. If he were at a University, they wouldn't dare. Frankly, the ITE trip generation data is mostly like a telephone book and can't be copyrighted, though its specific presentation (and maybe the regressions, though those seem pretty damn uncreative to me) can be. An analysis of that data is certainly fair game. An alternative though would be to set up a Trip Generation Wiki or Google Docs which is open, letting people upload their own data and updating the regressions automatically (since it is a pretty trivial spreadsheet operation).

I am thinking of unjoining ITE, my last professional organization (I quit APA a long time ago due to their profit-maximizing behavior since I gained nothing from the organization and they wanted a non-trivial share of my salary) over their heavy-handed, anti-public, guild-like behavior. If Mike were President, I would reconsider. The backwardness of ITE is one of many reasons Traffic Engineers are becoming increasingly unpopular.