Featured speakers included FHWA Administrator Mendez, Senator Klobuchar and former U.S. Representative Oberstar. Discussion focused on the innovations and improvements for road safety underway in Minnesota.

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety (DPS) Office of Traffic Safety has released its annual summary of traffic crashes, Minnesota Motor Vehicle Crash Facts 2011. According to the report, a total of 368 people died on Minnesota roads in 2011 and 1,159 were seriously injured. This represents a fourth consecutive annual drop in road fatalities and the lowest death count on record since 1944, when 356 were killed.

DPS traffic safety officials say smarter, safer driving is a critical factor for the continuing decline in road deaths. Seat belt compliance is at a record high, and alcohol-impaired crashes have dropped in recent years. DWI arrests have also fallen, indicating that more drivers are thinking twice about drinking and driving. Important legislation has also factored, including the ban on texting and the primary seat belt law.

More detail can be found in the Department of Public Safety's News Release

And those who want to really look into the data can go to the Crash Facts Report

HOW TO REDUCE MY COMMUTING TIME (AND YOURS)
By Herbert Mohring

Every adult American has had the unpleasant experience of being stuck in a traffic jam. Our highways seem, at times, to be caught in a dreadful gridlock. Demand for new highways is constantly growing and the search is on for ways of meeting this demand. While the Minneapolis-St. Paul area is not yet as congested as, say Southern California, our traffic problems do seem to be getting worse. What, if anything, can we or should we do about this problem? A favorite of modern day urban planners is to provide alternative modes of transportation such as buses or light rail systems. Such systems require very substantial subsidies with fares typically accounting for less than a quarter of operating expenses. In spite of substantial investments in alternative modes of transportation, public transportation use continues to decline in the United States.

Congestion on roadways is an inevitable consequence of the way we charge travelers. In choosing when and how to travel, every road user takes into account the delays they expect, but nobody considers the delays they impose on others. It is entirely rational and sensible for each user to ignore costs imposed on others. But these costs can be sizable. Think of a congested highway in which cars are traveling bumper to bumper. If we add a car in the middle, we delay all the cars behind that car by the time required for a single car to travel one car length. This is a small cost for each delayed car but it is borne by every automobile that is delayed. In fact, we can roughly estimate the costs imposed on others by adding a single automobile to a congested roadway. This cost is the product of the number of automobiles behind the added automobile and the time required to travel a single car length. Say we think of adding an automobile in the middle of the pack. The time that that automobile takes to reach its destination is the product of the number of cars ahead of it and the amount of time to travel one car length. So, the cumulative delay imposed on others is exactly equal to the travel time of a typical automobile.

Each traveler takes into account the time required to travel for himself or herself but rationally ignores the equal time cost imposed on others. The solution is to confront people with the true costs of travel in congested time periods. Tolls are an obvious way of confronting people with the time costs. With modern technology, it is possible to use transponders to make collection easy. A possible way of solving the congestion problem is to buy tolls at peak times of travel on specified lanes of highways or even the entire highway. It is important the tolls be higher for peak times travel than for non-peak time travel in order to induce people to change their travel times to do so. It might even make sense to, in the toll revenues, to subsidize non-peak time travel! Alternatively, toll revenues could be used to subsidize buses or other forms of mass transit. Such subsidies are preferable to our current use of sales and property tax revenues to
subsidize mass transit.

Congestion charges do invite heated (and often misinformed) debate. Sometimes they are regarded as unfairly taxing people who simply need to travel at peak time. This criticism is not particularly well-founded. The whole point of congestion charges is to make travel easier for those who simply need to travel at peak times. So, much of the tolls paid by such individuals is returned to them in the form of quicker and easier commutes.

Professor Herbert Mohring of the University of Minnesota did much of the pioneering work in figuring out how large tolls should be. His best estimate was that an optimal toll on Interstate 35W would be of the rate of 20 cents per mile or about $2.00 to $3.00 for travel from the southern suburbs to Minneapolis. This is not a particularly onerous charge (it is less than the cost of parking in much of Minneapolis) and would go a long way to solving our congestion problem. (Some of his research can be found in a paper titled "Congestion" which appeared in pp. 181-222 of Jose A Gomez-Ibanez, William B. Tye, and Clifford Winston, Essays in Transportation Economics and Policy: A Handbook in Honor of John R. Meyer, Washington, DC: Brookings,1999.)

An opportunity to hear from the CEO of BNSF Railway, the CEO of AASHTO, and Mr. Oberstar!

Tuesday, May 15, 2012 from 8:30 AM to 11:30 AM (CT)
Humphrey School of Public Affairs
Cowles Auditorium
301 19th Avenue S.
Minneapolis, MN 55455

RSVP through EventBrite

As gas prices rise and vehicles become more fuel efficient, gas tax revenues have not kept up with funding requirements for the nation's transportation system. The question is who will pay to maintain and make necessary improvements in the nation's transportation system in the future? Congress and the Administration are currently stymied on the transportation funding problem, and states are struggling to find new funding solutions. James L. Oberstar, Member of Congress (1975 to 2011) and Chair of the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (2007 to 2011), will host a forum to discuss the future of transportation funding and who will pay. The speakers will discuss what should be the basic principles for funding transportation, how we do it now, and how we should do it in the future. The forum will include a participant discussion led by Mr. Oberstar.

Host: James L. Oberstar

Speakers:

Jack Basso, Chief Operating Officer, American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO)

Matthew Rose, Chairman and CEO, BNSF Railway Co.

Stephen Lockwood, Senior VP, PB Consult, Parsons Brinckerhoff

James Whitty, Manager, Office of Innovative Partnerships and Alternative Funding, Oregon Department of Transportation

Discussion Panel:

Tom Sorel, Commissioner, Minnesota Department of Transportation

Janet Kavinoky, Executive Director, Transportation & Infrastructure, US Chamber of Commerce

Bill Goins, Worldwide Account Manager, FedEx Services

John Hausladen, President and CEO, Minnesota Truckers Association

Margaret Donahoe, Executive Director, Minnesota Transportation Alliance

Participant Discussion

Click here to RSVP

Researchers examined crash and health statistics from the State of Minnesota to determine that, controlling for all other factors, including Minnesota's already declining traffic fatalities, 68 fewer people had died and there were 320 fewer incapacitating injuries from traffic crashes, than would have been expected had the law not been changed.

These saved lives and serious injuries meant that $45 million was not spent on hospital bills, of which nearly $10 million would have been paid directly by Minnesota payers through programs like such as Medicare, Medicaid and other government insurance programs.

A longer description of the work can be found on the Humphrey School website.

The full study is currently available on website of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety

I always enjoyed Kris' lecture about his community development efforts in the Whittier Neighborhood during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Last fall, Kris joined me and Burke Murphy in teaching a new course on economic competitiveness and industry clusters. We enjoyed teaching together and learning along with the students on their team projects.

Kris touched many people in his life. He had a huge network and always seemed to know who was doing what in the community. Kris could always find the right speaker to talk about development issues for our class.

This is a great loss for our community. Kris was a great friend and I will miss him dearly.

Lee Munnich

Martin Olav Sabo Lecture Series
Friday, May 6, 10:00 - 11:00 a.m. Cowles Auditorium, Humphrey Center

Mr. Oberstar recently joined the Humphrey School of Public Affairs as a visiting scholar and chair of the advisory board for the University of Minnesota's Center for Excellence in Rural Safety. He will discuss his vision for transportation, Putting America First -- that is, ahead of our parochial, partisan, personal interests in transportation.

The Martin Olav Sabo Lecture Series, which began in 2002, is a forum for distinguished individuals to address the challenges of public service for our states and nation. This series honors the public service career of former Congressman Martin O. Sabo.

The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Register here.

This webinar will be broadcast live on the Web and available for later viewing. For more information, visit the event Web page.

Watch the Webcast

To access the audio portion of the webcast, please phone 800-683-4564 and enter code "176225."

About the Event
The Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT) developed a statewide Strategic Highway Safety Plan in 2007 to guide safety investments and decisions related to its Towards Zero Deaths efforts. Recently, Mn/DOT embarked on a statewide initiative to create a roadway safety plan for each of Minnesota's 87 counties. The County Road Safety Plan concentrates on information specifically associated with the county roadway network and identifies opportunities to reduce the number of fatal and serious injury crashes.

In this webinar, Brad Estochen will discuss details of the County Road Safety Plan initiative. As part of the project, Mn/DOT and its partners prioritize the roadway network by utilizing a risk assessment that takes into consideration motor vehicle crashes as well as known crash contributors. Using this analytical technique, Mn/DOT will provide each county with a risk assessment of its roadway network as well as a listing of recommended low-cost strategies for specific at-risk roads within its jurisdiction.

Speaker
Brad Estochen is a principal engineer for Mn/DOT and co-project manager for the County Road Safety Plan project. He works with Minnesota crash and roadway data to identify and mitigate high-crash locations throughout the state. Estochen is also involved in setting speed limits on Minnesota roadways, programming highway safety improvement projects, and promoting interagency cooperation for traffic safety efforts within the state of Minnesota.

More Information
This webinar is the first in a series of three sponsored by CERS. Dates for the other upcoming webinars have yet to be determined. For more information, please contact Kaydee Kirk, kkirk@umn.edu, 612-626-5854.

Sponsors
This seminar is sponsored by the University of Minnesota Center for Excellence in Rural Safety, in cooperation with the Federal Highway Administration.