Transportation and the Economy: Assessing Traffic-Generating Activity in the U.S. and Minnesota

Abstract

The transportation policy perspective in this report starts with measures of the importance of transportation in the U.S. economy. First, it presents estimates of the total spending--private and public--for transportation and all its service modes. It briefly examines the underlying assumptions about personal consumption , government expenditures, business investment , foreign exports and imports, labor productivity , labor force participation and population growth for each of three scenarios of the U.S . economy in 200_0 and 2005. The 1988 and 1990 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the 1988 U.S. Office of Business Economics Regional Series (OBERS) projection series serve as the baseline scenario. High and low economic activity scenarios are constructed that differ from the baseline scenario in their transportation requirements. The overall report series, of which this report is a part, presents the state and regional baseline series corresponding to the U.S. baseline series. An initial focus of the study is the preparation of an economic framework for relating the transportation requirements of individual state and regional economies to the tasks of state and regional transportation systems policy and planning. The overall study provides estimates of individual state and regional implications of the several U.S. scenarios.