Rural transportation challenges in the US take many forms—just ask Natalie Villwock-Witte, whose transportation research has taken her from coast to coast. As an assistant professor and research engineer at Montana State University’s Western Transportation Institute, she has studied transportation voucher programs in Texas, bicycle infrastructure in New Mexico, active transportation in rural Pennsylvania, and much more.
Despite the different settings and variety of situations, common threads unite these studies. During a keynote presentation at the 2024 CTS Transportation Research Conference, Villwock-Witte explored the shared transportation challenges uncovered through her research and offered recommendations for addressing them.
Villwock-Witte described four recent rural transportation projects she has worked on, pulling insights and lessons learned from each. The first project was a transportation voucher program in rural Texas that gave participants simple checks to access transportation to grocery shopping, medical care, personal care, or essential errands from a family member, friend, or transportation provider.
The program was needed for several reasons, Villwock-Witte said. “Historically you can’t use Medicaid transportation to purchase groceries, social isolation can lead to depression, and the lack of healthy food choices in rural areas contributes to obesity and other illnesses.”
The second project examined bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure in small communities. The researchers first identified three communities of less than 10,000 people in five different states. The states represented five regions of the US to ensure relevance to a national audience. Researchers conducted onsite visits to every community, interviewed local officials, reviewed planning documents, documented funding sources, and developed a case study for each community.
“One important finding was the variety of funding sources,” Villwock-Witte said. “Though many of [the sources] were very locally specific, it is helpful to think about how other local entities have funded their bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, because we don’t all want to draw from a single funding source.”
A third project took Villwock-Witte to Pennsylvania’s Northern Tier region to conduct an active transportation workshop. Partnering with local groups such as the regional economic development organization helped ensure the workshop had local buy-in. Additionally, branding the event “Walk, Bike & Roll” helped attract a wider variety of participants.
“We wanted to make it open to the public and not just leadership, because if you can find that public champion in a rural community, they can really help drive things through to the end line,” Villwock-Witte said.
In the fourth project, Villwock-Witte worked with local transportation officials in LaBelle, Florida, to support bicycle and pedestrian mobility. Boaters often dock in LaBelle and get around town by bike or on foot, so the community expressed interest in a bikeshare program, along with concerns about bicycle and pedestrian safety because of crashes on state roadways. Villwock-Witte brought in tools to gather accurate counts of the community’s bicycle and pedestrian activity to support its goals of better mobility for bicyclists and pedestrians.
“Rural transportation officials often wear many hats and deal with urgent issues, so they were really happy to have our help,” she added.
Villwock-Witte connected the four projects with overarching guidance about challenges and recommendations for transportation in rural areas. These included working with local officials, making connections, being curious, acknowledging the limited resources available in rural areas, and facilitating technical transfer.
“Be curious, be humble, and ask questions of people. Try to have them tell you instead of [you] telling them,” Villwock-Witte said. “With technical transfer, I’m trying to share what I have, learn from others, continue to move the needle, and provide better mobility for the folks that live in our rural communities.”
Watch a video of Villwock-Witte's keynote presentation.
—Megan Tsai, contributing writer
