This Metropolitan Council Automobile Managed Lanes Accessibility readme.txt file was generated on 20190909 by Kristin Carlson

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GENERAL INFORMATION
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Title of Dataset: MANAGED LANE ACCESSIBILITY EVALUATION SHAPEFILES

Author Information (Name, Institution, Address, Email)

	Principal Investigator: Andrew Owen aowen@umn.edu
	Associate or Co-investigator: Kristin Carlson carl4498@umn.edu
	Accessibility Observatory, Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota
	Address: 2221 University Avenue S.E. Minneapolis, MN 55414

Date of data collection: 20190101–20190531 

Geographic location of data collection: <Metropolitan Council Jurisdiction and 75 miles beyond. Twin Cities, Minnesota> 

Information about funding sources or sponsorship that supported the collection of the data: Metropolitan Council, National Accessibility Evaluation, Pooled-Fund project participant


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DATA & FILE OVERVIEW
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Zipped Shapefile

Naming format: <SCENARIO>_<DAYOFWEEK><TIME>.zip

METC_MANAGEDLANE_WKDY_8AM.*
METC_MANAGEDLANE_WKDY_12PM.*
METC_MANAGEDLANE_WKDY_5PM.*
METC_MANAGEDLANE_WKND_12PM.*

NOTE: Accessibility calculated for departure times at weekday 8AM, 12PM, 5PM, weekend 12PM.


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METHODOLOGICAL INFORMATION
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Block level accessibility is calculated at four day/time combinations for automobile travel. Each shapefile layer contains fields that describe cumulative job accessibility for the baseline and managed lane scenarios. 

The data are the results of an automobile accessibility analysis for MnPASS managed lane corridors within the Metropolitan Council jurisdiction. The details of the "Tier 1" managed lanes selected for this study can be found in the 2040 Thrive MSP Transportation Policy Plan (TPP). Census block level access to jobs is evaluated for the Existing/Under Construction MnPASS corridors and compared to the planned corridors included in the Tier 1 Current Revenue Scenario. Accessibility change is measured as the number of additional jobs a worker can reach when Tier 1 MnPASS corridor speeds are allowed compared to general purpose lane speeds, for the same departure time of day and travel duration.

The automobile travel time data is calculated using the Accessibility Observatory's version of OpenTripPlanner, an open source routing software. The automobile network attributes and speed data are licensed from TomTom and the data cover the Metropolitan Twin Cities for 2017. The jobs and worker data comes from the Census Bureau's annually updated Longitudinal Employer-Household Database (LEHD). Accessibility by automobile is calculated for each Census block by routing automobiles from origins to destinations and counting up the total number of jobs reachable from a block in a given travel time threshold, e.g. 15, 30, 45 minutes. 

NOTE: Please see "Automobile Accessibility Evaluation for Tier 1 MnPass Corridors" report for more methodological information

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DATA-SPECIFIC INFORMATION 
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Number of variables: 77

Number of cases/rows: 52,942

Variable list, defining any abbreviations, units of measure, codes or symbols used:

GEOID10: Block identifier

bs_5min: Baseline cumulative job accessibility in 5 min drive time from block X
t1_5min: Tier 1 managed lane cumulative job accessibility in 5 min drive time from block X
abschg_5min: The absolute change in job accessibility in 5 min drive time from block X (t1_5min - bs_5min)
pctchg_5min: The percent change in job accessibility in 5 min drive time from block X (t1_5min - bs_5min)/bs_5min
.
.
.
bs_90min:
t1_90min:
abschg_90min:
pctchg_90min:

bs_wt: The baseline travel time weighted job accessibility from block X (see report for weighting decay function)
t1_wt: The tier 1 managed lane travel time weighted job accessibility from block X (see report for weighting decay function)
abschg_wt: The absolute change in time weighted job accessibility from block X (t1_wt - bs_wt)
pctchg_wt: The percent change in time weighted job accessibility from block X (t1_wt - bs_wt)/bs_wt