By Chris McCahill
People living in dispersed rural areas face some of the greatest transportation challenges, according to a new study. However, living in more concentrated rural villages helps alleviate those challenges. Ensuring people can get around without relying on a car—even in rural pockets—is key to meeting their needs more affordably.
A new study from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the University of Vermont analyzed data from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey to understand how different living contexts affect transportation affordability and accessibility. The researchers compared travel experiences across large urban centers, smaller cities, suburbs, and two rural settings: dispersed areas and small towns.
To assess financial burdens, they relied on a question in the survey about whether “getting from place to place costs too much.” People with only a high-school education and those who did not identify as white were around twice as likely to say the cost of travel is a burden. Those earning less than $35,000 per year were nearly three times as likely. These patterns are consistent across place types.
The survey also asked whether people stayed home due to a lack of transportation options. The lack of car access made having unmet travel needs 10 to 15 times more likely in all settings except the most urban areas. Unemployed individuals also reported being three to four times more likely to stay home for this reason.
However, the researchers found that small towns in rural areas offer significant advantages over more dispersed rural locations. The study elaborated:
Notably, dispersed rural contexts are unique in that they exhibit this combination of higher rates of financial burden and unmet need relative to urban contexts—no other context exhibits this combination of factors. People living in rural small towns exhibit some of the burdens that those living in dispersed rural areas face, although they are also more similar to urban areas in terms of exhibiting mitigated burdens in some cases.
Drawing from other past studies, they conclude the density and accessibility of rural small towns helps foster social connections that make it easier to get a ride, leading to better mobility outcomes.
Accounting for many factors, their models showed that rural villages and central urban areas are statistically similar in terms of unmet travel needs and financial burden. In fact, “people living in small towns are 17% less likely to report financially burdensome travel compared to those in urban areas,” on average.
Living without a car remains a significant challenge in rural villages. The researchers noted:
In small towns, while people without vehicle access experience much higher rates of unmet need than their peers with vehicle access, they are also more likely to report financially burdensome travel. In dispersed contexts unmet needs are strongly tied to vehicle access, but financially burdensome travel is not. These findings point to rural populations faced with tradeoffs between paying high costs to access a vehicle, paying high costs for alternative travel options, and not meeting mobility needs. This supports prior literature that posits that people who live in rural areas are forced to own a car to meet basic mobility needs.
Another recent study found a similar pattern among empty nesters in Norway, where higher-income individuals could afford to move to areas with good transit and retain their cars, while lower-income individuals had to choose between car ownership and proximity to transit. These findings emphasize the importance of providing reliable and affordable alternatives to driving to reduce the financial burdens associated with car ownership, especially in rural and urban centers.