PhD candidate Tao Tao, Professor Jason Cao, and Dr. Xinyi Wu published the paper, “The road less traveled: Does rail transit matter?”, in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, a flagship journal of urban and regional planning in North America.

The authors quantified the effect of the Green Line light rail transit (LRT) in the Twin Cities on vehicular traffic using a quasi-experiment research design. They concluded that the LRT substitutes for automobile trips, yet induced demand and diverted trips tend to reduce this substitution effect somewhat over time. In general, building rail transit improves the performance of the transportation system as a whole.