The University of Minnesota Uses Technology to Make a TDM and Transit Pass Breakthrough – MinnPost
By Bill Lindeke
To glimpse the future, a world where cities take action on climate change, look at the campus of the University of Minnesota. With 50,000 students and 20,000 staff, the mammoth school straddling the Mississippi River on the edge of downtown Minneapolis is a great example of density and transportation working in tandem. To the extent that Minneapolis is a national leader around transit and bicycling, it has to a large degree the travel patterns around “the U” to thank for it.
There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, policies and infrastructure that makes the propinquity possible. When students arrived to campus this fall, there was a nearly invisible change shaping the densely populated campus, where space comes at a premium.
Two years ago, the administration launched a “universal transit pass” for all undergraduate students, allowing them to use university ID cards to access any bus or train in the city. This year they extended it to all staff, adding another 20,000 potential transit riders to the mix.
