Completing Rural Highways: Lessons from a workshop series for state transportation agencies

Megan Link, and Chris McCahill. Completing Rural Highways. Smart Growth America, 2024.

Safety for people who walk, bike, or roll is of growing importance across the U.S., including rural areas. From November 2022 to May 2023, Smart Growth America worked with the State Smart Transportation Initiative to host a series of four virtual workshops for staff at state departments of transportation (DOTs) to discuss challenges and strategies for implementing Complete Streets on state-owned rural roads. The goals of these workshops were to: 1) provide space for small teams from state DOTs to engage in peer-to-peer conversations, idea-exchange, and problem-solving; and 2) identify and uplift the approaches that are working for state DOTs at the national level. There were roughly 30 participants from nine states. Each state had at least one representative in policy or planning, one in engineering or design, and one in asset management or maintenance.

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