What's needed to improve safety and mobility in rural transportation networks
Roads & Bridges
By CARLA LITTLE
JANUARY 8, 2021
When someone says rural transportation, what do you picture?
A two-lane highway with large trucks transporting crops or the county expressway that takes urban commuters to the suburbs?
A daily bus service in a small city of 50,000 or the once-a-week shuttle in a remote town of 500 that takes residents to the nearest hospital?
Plows clearing snow in the north or hurricane evacuation routes in the south?
Rural transportation is all of that and more. In fact, for those who work to improve safety and mobility in rural transportation networks, it can be challenging to capture the scope and complexity of what’s needed. “Rural transportation issues are both cross-cutting and unique,” said Jaime Sullivan, Director of the National Center for Rural Road Safety. “We share some needs with urban areas like best materials for construction or best practices for maintenance and operations, but there are others that urban areas rarely deal with, like insufficient communications infrastructure for communicating with emergency responders and collecting transit data or educating drivers on how to safely share the road with wide, slow-moving agricultural equipment.”
View the full article: RoadsBridges.com
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