Online newsletter Volume 2, Number 2,  Summer 2004

The Complexity of Rural Roads 

The changing nature of rural traffic demands new ways to improve safety

There are more miles of rural roads than any other type of roadway in the U.S. transportation network, and it is on rural roads where the majority of fatal crashes—about 60 percent—occur. The reasons for this are complex, but if they can be better understood, and if that understanding can be used to guide actions to lower these rates, significant safety gains can be realized.

Attempts to learn more about the systemic causes of rural-road fatalities and identify effective mitigations are complicated by a number of elements: rural roads tend to receive less attention because users are spread across such a wide geographic and multi-jurisdictional swath that it is difficult to accumulate a "critical mass" of advocates. There is even a lack of general agreement over what characterizes "rural." For example, the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) uses two definitions for the term, depending on the context. (See sidebar for link to FHWA's classifications) For the purposes of grouping streets and highways according to the service they are intended to provide in relation to the total public road system (highway functional classification) and outdoor advertising regulations, "rural" is defined as anything bordering population centers of 5,000 or less. For planning purposes, however, "rural" is used in opposition to "suburban" and "urban," which are more populous and can be defined by a combination of different criteria—for instance, "urban" is considered a population center of more than 50,000 people. (For the purposes of the 60 percent fatality figure, the first, most inclusive, definition was used.)

Still, neither of these provides a clear picture of what distinguishes a "rural" road from an "urban" one. There are many types of rural area—some, for instance, have agricultural-based economies and are located far from large metropolitan areas, while others are economically dependent on and may have close cultural ties to nearby cities. Furthermore, there are many types of rural road, including interstate highways that run through rural areas, rural-area "arterial" roadways (roads that supplement the interstate system) and "local" roads such as those that connect farms to towns. When analyzing the factors that contribute to the high fatality rate on rural roads, it is important to acknowledge that different areas, even while they may share the "rural" classification, may have different characteristics and therefore different traffic safety needs.

This issue of the Traffic Safety Center newsletter examines rural-road crashes, including the demographics of the victims of rural-road crashes; road safety issues in the rapidly growing rural areas located on the fringe of developed areas; the problems that face more traditional, remote rural areas; a sampling of interventions that have demonstrated some success; along with a special look at farmworkers; and challenges to reducing emergency medical services response times.

Rural-Road Crashes: Who's Involved?

The majority of people involved in fatal rural-road crashes are people who live in rural areas, as opposed to transient users of rural roads, according to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) study. Behaviors such as using alcohol, speeding, and low rates of seat belt use, and accidents involving high speeds, vehicle rollovers and ejections (which increase the dangers for unbelted occupants) are among the most prominent factors contributing to the high rural crash and fatality rate, another NHTSA report notes. Indeed, while the rural seat belt use rate has risen in the last few years to 73 percent, it still remains below the national rate of 75 percent. Although this difference may not seem significant, the consequences of not wearing seat belts on rural roads tend to be more serious, because of the nature of rural-road crashes described above.

In addition, rural-area occupants of pickup trucks traditionally have lower seat belt compliance rates than their counterparts in passenger cars, according to NHTSA’s 2003 National Occupant Protection Use Survey—an observed rate of seat belt use of 69 percent in pickup trucks, compared to 81 percent for passenger cars and 83 percent for vans and SUVs. According to the report, pickup truck drivers explained their decision not to buckle up by saying that they felt the size of their vehicles protected them from injury, that seat belts were unnecessary for short trips, and that they feared being trapped in the vehicle by the seat belt in the event of a crash. Furthermore, while, on average, drivers involved in fatal crashes in rural areas were about as likely as those involved in urban-area fatal crashes to have been drinking, certain rural areas, such as those with large seasonal and temporary-worker populations, have disproportionately high rates of driving under the influence.

Older adults living in rural areas also face unique transportation-related dangers. A 2004 Surface Transportation Policy Project report states that over half of non-drivers age 65 and older stay home on any given day, and that the isolation of non-drivers affects the rural aging population disproportionately. (See the Traffic Safety Center study "Predictors of Driving Behavior and Adverse Driving Outcomes in an Elderly Population.") Rural areas have fewer reliable transit services, and walking "into town" is often not an option due to long distances and dangerous roads.

What Is Rural?

While, for many, the term "rural road" evokes images of miles of poorly paved two-lane roads running through wheat fields and orchards, or steep, winding roads such as the kind that carry logging trucks in the Pacific Northwest, today's definitions of "rural roads" are more nuanced. In its report on planning in rural areas, the FHWA defines "rural" as those areas outside any incorporated or unincorporated city or town and further divides this classification into three categories: "basic rural," "developed rural" and "urban boundary rural." For the purposes of this newsletter, these categories have been collapsed into two types of rural: "traditional rural" and "urban boundary rural." Although not every rural-area traffic safety issue falls neatly into one of these two groups, they serve as useful guides when discussing the nature of rural-road crashes.

Just as people fled the cities for the suburbs 50 years ago, today more and more people are migrating to these "urban boundary rural" areas. In these areas, "economic growth, population growth, and transportation growth are tied to the urban center," according to the FHWA. Where new kinds of traffic safety problems can occur is on these roads, which once carried mostly farmworkers, tractors and trucks, and which are now serving a variety of travelers during peak hours, including commuters whose driving habits may clash with rural transportation patterns. These roads may become mixed-use nightmares when commuters begin to seek an alternative to the adjacent heavily congested highway, or when the rural road is their only option.

The FHWA's Public Roads magazine reports that one of the major rural-area traffic safety issues has to do with drivers traveling at different speeds. While an urban-area freeway carries mostly cars, trucks and SUVs traveling at about the same speed, on rural roads "speed variation caused by the presence of buses, heavy trucks, agricultural vehicles, mopeds and bicyclists ... generates higher crash risk ... than on other types of roads."

"Traditional rural" covers both the FHWA's "basic rural" and much of what it calls "developed rural." These areas may have one or two population centers of 5,000 or so, but their economies are typically agricultural- or natural resource-based, and their transportation patterns are characterized by commodity-to-market trips, with some intercity travel and freight transport. According to the FHWA, in contrast to the stable or growing populations of developed rural areas, the populations of basic rural areas are stable or shrinking. Both of these areas' more visible transportation- and traffic-safety-related problems include little access to reliable transit, low seat belt use rates and emergency medical services response times that are longer than average.

Accompanying articles in this newsletter examine specific examples of traffic safety problems in the two types of rural setting: Northern California's Vasco Road, which is in an "urban boundary rural" setting, and Huron, CA, which occupies a "traditional rural" setting near Fresno in California's Central Valley.

Rapid Growth Presses Limits

Vasco Road, a two-lane route that runs from Livermore in Alameda County (in San Francisco’s East Bay) through eastern Contra Costa County and to the foothills beyond, carried 16,000 vehicles per day in 1996; at last count, Vasco is carrying more than 22,000 vehicles per day, many of them transporting commuters traveling to jobs in Alameda County and San Francisco. After three fatal crashes—which killed seven people—on the road in the summer of 2003, county officials began to look at ways to make the road safer and meet the demand posed by a growing population. (Click here to read the story)

Traditional Rural: Special Challenges

In Huron, public attention was heightened in 1999 in the wake of a fatal crash of a van carrying 15 farmworkers, 13 of whom were killed. The issues center around farmworker transportation and labor and housing policies.

Where there are high percentages of migrant workers, such as California's Central Valley, road safety issues have unique aspects. These areas are often characterized by inadequate, unsafe and unreliable transportation services for farmworkers. Thus, these areas often experience high numbers of workers riding unbelted in vans, as well as workers driving themselves and others without the proper training and licensing.

In the "traditional" rural areas, which the FHWA describes as not dependent on a nearby metropolis for population, economic, or transportation-related growth, traffic safety issues are multifarious and complex. Because their populations are generally steady or declining, their roads are less likely to experience several fatal crashes in a short period of time, as Vasco Road has. Since crashes are usually more dispersed, it may be more difficult to determine how funds should be spent when it comes to traffic safety. For instance, because of the high number of crashes that occurred on Vasco Road, it was clear to local officials that some kind of barrier was needed between the road's two lanes, but when rural areas see little change in population and transportation patterns, there may not be "danger spots" that suggest the need for immediate action.

Another major traffic safety risk in traditional rural areas whose economies are largely agricultural-based comes from farm equipment-related injuries. Tractor accidents are the leading cause of farm fatalities, according to the California Farm Bureau Federation. And a majority—58 percent—of farm vehicle accidents involved collisions with a non-farm vehicle.
(Click here to read the story)

What Can Work

In these areas, a combination of measures is needed to decrease the risk of fatal crashes. For instance, improvements such as the installation of stop lights and stop signs, widening roads and putting in guardrails, in addition to maintenance measures such as repainting center lines and fixing potholes, are important steps in reducing the risk of crash. However, because a high percentage of rural-road fatalities are linked to speeding, DUI and lack of seat belt use, broad-based prevention campaigns, e.g., local coalitions targeting the problem, policy-oriented solutions (such as prohibiting the sale of cold beers at gas station mini-marts), primary seat belt laws, and social marketing campaigns, along with school-based efforts, that address these problems specifically are key components of any effort to reduce the rural-road fatality rate. A number of programs have been developed to respond some of these challenges. (Click here to read the story)

When Speed Saves Lives

In addition, because lags in EMS response time increase the risk of serious injuries turning fatal when crashes do occur, it is important for rural communities to explore ways of reducing response times or train local citizens to administer basic treatments until EMS units arrive on the scene. (Click here to read the story)

As different as their settings can be, traditional rural and urban boundary rural areas do, however, share certain problems, such as lack of federal and state funding to build and maintain safe roads and a clear chain of authority and responsibility for policy making. According to Public Roads, roads in rural areas, especially those designated "local roads” (those roads that provide limited mobility and are the primary access to residential areas, businesses, farms and other local areas) tend to fall through the cracks of federal, state and county funding programs. These and other issues are explored at greater length in the accompanying articles, links to which can be found in the body of this story, in the list below and in the sidebar on the left.