From November 2022 to May 2023, Smart Growth America worked with the State Smart Transportation Initiative, a project of SGA and the High Road Strategy Center, 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: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Tennessee, Utah and Washington. Each state had at least one representative in policy or planning, one in engineering or design, and one in asset management or maintenance.

Defining rural

There is no one all-encompassing definition of rural. The diverse history, cultures, and needs of people that make up rural communities vary from place to place—rural areas are different from suburban and urban areas and different from other rural areas. To build an understanding of these differences—which is essential to support evidence-based decision-making at the local, state, and federal levels—Smart Growth America developed seven general typologies for the most common rural community characteristics. It is important to note that these typologies are not mutually exclusive, as rural communities may and often do exhibit characteristics of more than one typology. Learn more here.

What we learned

Participants identified a range of challenges and perceived barriers to implementing Complete Streets elements on rural highways within their transportation agency. A sample of the types of barriers expressed is shown in the figure below, grouped into several broad, overlapping categories.

Learn more about each of these challenges by clicking the images below.

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This work was completed in partnership with CDC’s Active People, Healthy Nation℠ Initiative, which is a national initiative to help 27 million Americans become more physically active by 2027. This initiative promotes effective strategies recommended by the Community Preventive Services Task Force to improve physical activity. CDC, in collaboration with state, community, and national partners, promotes these proven strategies through Active People, Healthy Nation to ensure that all Americans have access to safe and accessible places for physical activity.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided support for this project under cooperative agreement OT18-1802 supporting the Active People, Healthy Nation^SM Initiative, a national initiative led by the CDC to help 27 million Americans become more physically active by 2027. Learn more: https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/activepeoplehealthynation/index.html. The findings and conclusions in this series are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.