| Assessing the Potential for Transit-Oriented Development in the Twin Cities (CTOD) |
| The McKnight Foundation |
| Twin Cities, Minnesota | December 2005 | to | present |
| The Twin Cities region of Minnesota only recently opened its first light rail line. While under construction, this line |
| was very controversial due to its perceived high cost. Nevertheless, since the line opened in April 2004, it has |
| been extremely successful, with ridership far exceeding projections. However, the region still faces extreme |
| congestion, and transit will not have much impact on this problem unless a much more extensive network is built. |
| The McKnight Foundation, a large Minneapolis-based foundation with a very strong civic presence, recognized |
| that this network would not be built without the business community pressuring the state legislature for funding. |
| To this end, the McKnight Foundation engaged the Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD) to study the |
| economic benefits of transit to the region. As a research partner in CTOD, Strategic Economics took the lead in |
| this work by conducting a detailed literature review on the economic impacts of transit on regional |
| competitiveness, identifying the region’s major employment centers and their spatial relationship to future transit |
| lines, and estimating future demand for TOD housing to show that workers may be interested in living near transit. |
| In addition, the project builds on past CTOD work to show the average costs of regional congestion to companies |
| in the United States. This analysis will be combined in a report designed to build support in the business |
| community for a regional sales tax initiative that could be used to help finance future transit system extensions. |