In the vast and diverse Appalachia region, the connection between transportation access and economic development plays a crucial role in shaping opportunities for residents. In the recently completed Transportation Access in Appalachia project, CTS’s Accessibility Observatory pioneered new ways to quantify and understand these connections.
Commissioned by the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and led by the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration, the project serves as a cornerstone for regional planning efforts aimed at bridging economic divides and promoting equitable access to jobs, education, health care, and other essential services.
The key findings from this project highlight how innovative methodologies and transportation accessibility metrics can inform decision making across this region’s 13 states. The insights also provide a new perspective from which the region’s unique transportation challenges can be tackled.
For this project, the researchers define accessibility as the ease with which residents can reach valued destinations, such as jobs, schools, health care facilities, and intermodal freight hubs. This work builds on the foundation laid by the 2020 Access in Appalachia Primer, expanding the analysis to include multiple transportation modes—driving, walking to a station and taking public transit, biking—and evaluating how these modes influence residents’ ability to access essential destinations.
With a focus on the intersection of transportation, land use, and economic development, the project analyzed how the built environment impacts the daily lives of Appalachian residents, especially in rural and economically distressed counties.
The findings reveal a clear contrast in accessibility between urban and rural areas: residents of rural and semi-rural counties face considerably longer travel times to essential services such as education and health care. For example, these residents must spend 30–40 percent more time to reach secondary and post-secondary educational institutions compared to their urban counterparts. This disparity is particularly evident in job accessibility measures. In urban and economically vibrant counties, residents enjoy robust job access across all transportation modes, especially driving. In rural areas, however, access to employment opportunities is much more limited.
The report underscores a critical issue in rural Appalachia—access to health care. Rural counties, which often have fewer health care facilities and longer travel times to reach them, face a significant challenge in ensuring timely access to urgent care, trauma centers, and primary health services. The typical rural resident must travel 38 minutes by car to reach the nearest trauma center, compared to just 24 minutes for urban residents. In emergency situations, these minutes can make a life-or-death difference.
The findings also reinforce the strong link between transportation access and economic development. Counties with higher accessibility to jobs and other essential destinations often align with economic hubs within the region. These hubs serve as vital engines of growth, with transportation networks that support mobility and access to opportunity. In economically distressed counties, travel times to intermodal freight facilities such as air cargo and rail terminals are significantly longer than in more economically competitive counties. This disparity highlights the need for improved transportation connections to support economic mobility and workforce development, particularly in the freight sector.
The accessibility metrics developed through this project could play a central role in shaping transportation strategies that promote equitable access to jobs, education, health care, and economic opportunities. "By quantifying the access gap between urban and rural areas, we're providing regional leaders the data they need to make targeted investments," says Eric Lind, director of the Accessibility Observatory and CTS scholar. "These metrics have the potential to reshape how we think about infrastructure and equity."
Lind emphasizes the importance of integrating accessibility measures into state transportation planning. "We hope that the insights from this project will lead to these metrics being used as performance measures within state transportation planning efforts," Lind says. “Our goal is to see states and regions move closer to prioritizing equitable access for all without compromising economic outcomes, and support them in that process through data-driven analysis."
Several state departments of transportation are already incorporating these metrics into their long-range plans and priorities. For more information, please contact Accessibility Observatory staff.
View the October 29 webinar recording on Measuring Transportation Accessibility in Appalachia.
—Saumya Jain, Accessibility Observatory researcher
