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TTavej Behavior • Commuters no longer travel inward in the morning and. outward at night. _ Instead, they commute throughout the region, with suburb-to suburb • commuting outweighing suburb-to-city. Lifestyle change has greatly influenced travel in the Twin Cities area. • Nearly seven of every ten women over age 16 were in the work force in 1990. • There were 600,000 more licensed drivers in 1990 than in 1970; the number of licensed women drivers now equals licensed men drivers. • The number of people ages 65 years and older with licenses increased from 66 percent in 1970 to 84 percent in 1990. • R majority of households now have two cars; 33 percent had two cars in 1970 and 65 percent had two cars in 1990. • Households without cars fell to under 10 percent of all households and represented only five percent of the population, meaning 95 out of every 100 persons is in a household with a car. The afternoon "rush hour" is not dominated by work-oriented travel. Shopping trips and other service-related travel constitute a significant proportion of late afternoon trips. This trend reflects the needs of two-worker households. Many destinations-like day-care pickups and grocery shopping-are stops on the way home from work and reflect the way that busy people cope with the time demands of contemporary society. • Societal change, plus growth and dispersal of the region's population and work force, have been accompanied by an explosion in travel in the past 20 years. The greatest change of all has occurred in vehicle-miles traveled, which best measures the demand for highway capacity. The region's population grew by 20 percent from 1970 to 1990, but daily vehicle-miles -traveled increased by 130 percent. Four factors are at work multiplying travel. The combined influence of these four factors added up to an increase in daily travel of over 32 million vehicle miles: • Population growth added 8 million miles of daily vehicle travel. • Higher per-capita rates of personal travel- added 9 million miles of daily vehicle travel. In large part this is due to more workers going to more jobs. • Switching from a car pool or bus to driving alone (decline in auto occupancy) added 5 million miles of daily vehicle travel. • Longer trips caused by the spread of development added another 10 million miles of daily vehicle travel. Traffic is a highly complex response to urban expansion, new societal norms and the need to access millions of individual destinations. Personal mobility has become paramount. The region's population is expected to increase to 2.7 million by the year 2010; nearly all of this growth is predicted for the suburbs. ' If increased trip distances follow. the new suburban and exurban growth as in the past, it may fuel a continued explosion of vehicle-miles traveled. Vl .F ' Y