John Hennessy III,
P.E.
TRIP
An aging and increasingly diverse rural America plays a vital role as home to a significant share of the nation’s population, natural resources and tourist destinations. It is also the primary source of the energy, food and fiber that drive the U.S. economy. Rural Americans are more reliant on the quality of their transportation system than their urban counterparts.
This month an opinion piece came out on the Forbes website proposing that telemedicine’s day has come. The piece, written by venture capitalist Skip Fleshman, basically predicts that 2015 will be the year that remote interactions between medical professionals and patients become not just possible, but practical. “I spend a lot of time crisscrossing the country chatting with leading healthcare providers and insurers about their technology needs,” he writes. “By far the area they are most interested in is telemedicine.”…The people who stand the most to gain from Telemedicine are, unfortunately, the ones least likely to have the infrastructure needed for it. The CDC issued a report two years ago highlighting the various disparities in healthcare access by population groups in the U.S. In no surprise the report revealed that when viewed as groups, a number of factors reduced the availability of healthcare access.
View this complete post...This paper looks at alternatives for promoting and strengthening multimodal transportation in rural and small urban areas. It outlines 65 different innovative activities around the United States that have been undertaken to promote multimodalism in rural areas and smaller towns. These activities are grouped into six categories: improving transit options; accommodating alternative vehicles; supporting pedestrian and bicycle travel; multimodal land use planning; the use of financial incentives to promote multimodal land use development; and other alternatives that do not fit in these five categories.
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NATIONAL CENTER FOR TRANSIT RESEARCH
Transit systems in rural and small urban areas are often viewed as valuable community assets due to the increased mobility they provide to those without other means of travel. The value of those services, however, has been largely unmeasured, and there are often impacts that go unidentified. As transit systems compete for funding at local, state, and federal levels, it is important to identify and quantify, where possible, the impacts that the services have within local communities, as well throughout the state or country.
NATIONAL RURAL HOUSING COALITION
For several decades, communities in rural America have struggled to provide access to clean, decent, and affordable housing. With lower incomes and higher poverty rates, rural renters—including aging seniors, individuals and families with very low incomes, persons with disabilities, and farmworkers—face especially daunting barriers to affordable housing.
AARP PUBLIC POLICY INSTITUTE
Millions of rural residents have lost access to scheduled intercity bus service in recent years as the nation’s largest private carriers have focused on profitable, longer-haul interstate travel. This Spotlight on the Issues illustrates how one state has created a successful public–private initiative to restore service to its rural communities. What Washington State has accomplished serves as a model for other states looking to take advantage of alternative local match requirements.
RECONNECTING AMERICA
Public transportation plays a critical and expanding role in rural America. Just as it does in urban environments, public transportation in small towns and rural areas provides mobility choices and promotes sustainable economies. Across the country, small towns and rural communities are developing partnerships to build intermodal transit centers, creating circulator buses to catalyze private investments in their downtowns, and improving connections between people and jobs.
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According to Slate, “Much of the public health debate over rising obesity rates has turned to these “food deserts,” where convenience store fare is more accessible—and more expensive—than healthier options farther away…” A comment sums up the issue: “As our population ages, more and more will have to move out of rural areas into urban centers where services and basic necessities can be reached via public transportation. I wish our government and local planners had the wisdom to anticipate such problems”
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TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH BOARD
North America’s rural landscape is dotted with isolated settlements, villages, and small towns that are typically located on rural roads where the general speed limit is 55 to 60 mph (90 to 100 km/h). Motorists are expected to slow down as they pass through these settlement areas, reducing their operating speed to 30 or 40 mph (50 or 65 km/h) in sections of road known as transition zones…There is clearly a need for better and more information concerning rural high-to-low speed transitions. This synthesis report is a preliminary step in that direction.
Based on preliminary reports from the State Highway Agencies, travel during December 2010 on all roads and streets in the nation changed by +0.6 percent (1.4 billion vehicle miles) resulting in estimated travel for the month at 243.4** billion vehicle-miles.
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