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Case studies of two telecommuting programs were conducted as part of a larger research effort devoted to examining the implications of telecommunications for Minnesota transportation and community development. Data were collected in a large private high-technology firm and in a public agency located in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area. A multiple method design was employed including a cross-section survey of nontelecommuting employees; a census survey of telecommuters; and in-depth interviews with telecommuters, their coworkers, and their supervisors. Analyses were conducted to explore the relationship between telecommuting and travel behavior and the potential effects of travel outcomes for community systems. Results indicate that telecommuting implementation strategies differ within and between organizations, and these differing approaches appear to moderate the relationship between telecommuting and complex travel behaviors, such as local errand running and trip chaining. Additional findings concur with those of other studies, and the difficulty of the commute is highlighted as a primary factor in understanding the choice to telecommute and its impact on travel behavior.

This paper presents the results of an evaluation study of the behavioral impacts of a high-occupancy toll (HOT) lane project in Minnesota. The I-394 MnPASS Express Lane Project is the fifth HOT lane project implemented in the United States. HOT lanes remain a new enough concept that there is little empirical information on methods for evaluating them or on their impacts on travel behavior for transportation planners and policy makers to use when making decisions about future facilities. The MnPASS evaluation study is significant not only because it uses a panel design but also because it involved multiple waves of stated preference (SP) experiments. These waves were conducted before and after project implementation. This paper uses information from the evaluation study to examine two significant issues: (a) How applicable is a panel design to evaluating road pricing projects? and (b) How does willingness to pay vary on the basis of before-and-after iterations of the SP experiments?

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Research was done to reveal the travel impact of e-shopping in the Minneapolis–St. Paul (Twin Cities) metropolitan area of Minnesota. A sample of Internet users drawn from urban, suburban, and exurban neighborhoods was used to identify the relationship between e-shopping and in-store shopping. An online survey composed of direct and attitudinal questions was used to obtain the data. Ordered probit models were developed to account for the influences of a variety of confounding factors, such as shopping attitudes, shopping accessibility, shopping responsibility, and sociodemographics. The preliminary results, controlled for the confounding factors, show that e-shopping behavior (for online searching and online buying) tends to have a complementarity effect on in-store shopping.