Agenda - Council Work Session - 10/12/2021

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Jennifer Wiltgen Minnesota Department of Transportation June 29, 2021 Page 3 Streetlight Platform and Data Configurations The OD analysis was completed using the StreetLight Data software platform. StreetLight is a private company that compiles anonymized location records from smart phones and navigation devices in connected vehicles and transforms these location records into travel patterns. It delivers unique insights into how vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians move on virtually every road and census block. Two types of data were extracted from StreetLight for the OD analysis: Origin -Middle -Filter - Destination (OMD) trips and Top Routes data. This data was used to identify the origins (Os) and destinations (Ds) of the trips using the river crossings (Middle Filters) via different highways (Top Routes). The OD analysis was conducted primarily for person trips during the AM peak period (6:00 to 10:00 am), the PM peak period (3:00 to 7:00 pm) and daily during weekdays (Monday —Thursday) from April 1st to 30th and September 1st to October 31 st, 2019. A comparative analysis was conducted later between weekdays and Memorial Day Friday afternoon to investigate how travel patterns change between a weekday afternoon and a holiday weekend Friday afternoon. Origin -Destination Zone Development MnDOT conducted an initial OD study using zip code boundaries in the study area. Further OD analysis indicated two major drawbacks when the zip code boundaries were used for the crossing OD analysis: • Some zip code areas covered both sides of the Mississippi River, and thus the extracted OD trips withing those zip codes do no demonstrate how the trips used the river crossings (for example, the zip code for the city of Elk River). • Some zip code areas covered multiple cities in the immediate river crossing area and the OD trips within those zip codes do not fully demonstrate how the trips would differ from city to city in the immediate river crossing while this level of OD data would be the most desirable for this analysis. To overcome these drawbacks, a refined Traffic Analysis Zone (TAZ) structure was used. This TAZ structure was developed by the Met Council for its regional travel demand model and modified to establish ODs for this analysis. The Met Council TAZ structure with 3,030 TAZs was aggregated into 86 ODs in three subregions. Figure 0.1 in the appendix illustrates the three subregions and ODs based on the Met Council TAZs. The city and county jurisdictional boundaries were used as boundaries whenever possible in the OD development process to ensure that OD trips from the StreetLight data could be aggregated at those jurisdiction levels. There were 31 external pass -through stations which were included to capture interregional trips using the river crossings. To capture OD trips using the river crossings, six pass -through gates were defined on the three crossings in both directions as Middle Filter Zones. Origin -Destination Data Postprocessing StreetLight provides visualization results along with hundreds of thousands of OD data records in CSV files. Each raw OD record includes the total volumes (averaged from the three months of data)