Business View Civil and Municipal l December 2022

5 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 12 ONE THIRD OF RURAL ROADS ARE IN POOR SHAPE, SURVEY SAYS Source The Daily Yonder, Liz Carey, November 23, 2022 Many rural roads and bridges are in poor shape, a new report says, and fixing them will cost $180 billion. Th e report from TRIP , a national transportation research non-profit, found that nearly a third of rural roads (31%) are in poor or mediocre condition and nearly a tenth of rural bridges lack structural integrity. “A lot of these rural roads were built for very light traffic essentially,” Rocky Moretti, TRIP director of policy and research said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “Now, whether it’s because of increased agriculture or energy extraction, you’ve got a lot of these roads starting to carry more traffic, and in many cases, large commercial traffic, and they just weren’t built to those standards. ” That leads to more fatal accidents, he said. In 2020, non-interstate rural roads had a traffic fatality rate of 2.17 deaths for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT), nearly twice the rate on all other roads (1.09). Despite the fact that rural non-interstate roads only carry 23% of all vehicle traffic in the country, those roads are where an estimated 38% of all the traffic deaths happen. OPENING L INES O p e n i n g L i n e s