SAI-R: Uncovering Barriers to Low-Carbon Travel to Strengthen Transportation Infrastructure in Rural Communities

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

Reducing the environmental impact of travel in small and rural communities will be necessary to meet U.S. climate goals. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the U.S., and transportation GHGs are particularly significant in small and rural communities where 30% of U.S. auto-travel occurs and the average person travels 40% farther than their urban counterparts.

However, most research that focuses on reducing transportation GHGs has been conducted in urban areas despite important differences in the physical and social contexts of rural communities. A clear understanding of those differences is needed to design GHG reduction strategies that work in rural contexts. The lack of rural travel behavior research stems in part from a lack of robust information about where, why and how people who live in rural places travel.

This SAI research project strengthens understanding of travel behavior in small and rural communities by first building a powerful new rural travel dataset and then using it to uncover the factors that influence how people travel in rural communities. This project also evaluates the effects of infrastructure investments and policies on the travel decisions and transportation GHGs of people in small and rural communities.

Travel in small and rural communities is a significant driver of overall GHG emissions from the transportation sector. This project fills a critical gap in knowledge about rural travel behavior by creating a novel panel dataset that fuses spatially detailed data from three