Advances in oil extraction technology such as hydraulic fracturing have improved capabilities to extract and produce oil in the Bakken and Three Forks shale formations located in North Dakota, Montana, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. From 2004 to the present, there has been a significant increase in oil rigs and new oil wells in these areas, resulting in increased impacts to the local, county, state, and federal roadway network. Traditional methods of rural traffic forecasting using an established growth rate are not sufficient under the changing traffic levels. The goal of this research is to develop a traffic model that will improve segment specific traffic forecasts for use in highway design and planning. The traffic model will consist of five main components: 1) a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) network model of local, county, state and federal roads, 2) a truck costing model for use in estimating segment specific user costs, 3) a spatial oil location model to estimate future oil development areas, 4) a series of mathematical programming models to optimize a multi-region oil development area for nine individual input/output movements, and 5) an aggregation of multiple routings to segment specific traffic levels in a GIS network model.

The justification of government support of rural transit on the basis of the presence of increasing returns to scale and the most efficient regional organization of transit is investigated. Returns to density, size, and scope at most levels of output were found. Cost subadditivity, where a monopoly firm can provide service at a lower cost than two firms, was found for many, but not all observations. The presence of natural monopoly in rural transit in a strict sense is rejected. The findings and implications are directly applicable to rural transit in North Dakota and should be helpful in informing future federal policy as well as rural transit policy, service design, and operation in other states.