Cost of Transportation and Housing
About the measures
Transportation and housing costs is a new performance measure. Using Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development Cost of Living data and American Community Survey data on median household income in Minnesota, MnDOT can calculate percentage of median household income necessary to meet basic housing and transportation needs. For this measure, a typical family in Minnesota is comprised of 3 people – 2 adults, 1 child, and 1.5 workers. While MnDOT has not yet adopted a target for this measure, its goal is to understand the proportion of a Minnesotan’s income that is needed to be spent on the necessities of housing and transportation.
Recent trends
In 2021, the typical Minnesotan household needed 21.8% of their income for basic transportation and housing needs. This follows an overall pattern of decreasing transportation and housing basic costs over the last five years. The 2022 ACS data will not be available until at least December 2023.
Where we want to go
Through the SMTP work plan, MnDOT will continue to explore measures related to healthy equitable communities. Multimodal accessibility is the study of the travel between origins and destinations. MnDOT is currently developing a multimodal accessibility performance measure that will help inform how well the transportation network provides multimodal options. As public engagement on performance measurement continues, multimodal accessibility will an area of focus to aid in developing the measure.