Nationwide, rural communities and their roadways are disproportionately affected by road safety issues. While 19% of Americans live in rural areas, deaths on rural roadways account for about 50% of all traffic fatalities. Multiple, complex factors contribute to transportation‐related fatalities and injuries on rural roadways, including their infrastructure—outdated designs, sharp curves, steep grades, limited sight distances, sharp pavement drop‐offs—and unique environments—slow‐moving vehicles, animals, high speeds, and extreme weather conditions.

While ADS technologies bring the promise of even greater safety on our Nation’s roadways, rural roads are underrepresented in ADS research today. To date, due to the complexity of rural environments, most manufacturers have focused in mapping and testing on urban, clearly‐ marked roads. But mobility is essential to rural America, particularly in isolated areas.

A relatively large and growing portion of rural and small‐town residents are older Americans. As our Nation’s population exponentially ages over the next few decades and Americans continue their desire to “age in place” (continuing to live in their own home regardless of age, income, or ability level), increased rural mobility options will be to simply maintain and, ideally, improve the safety on these roadways. Today, many of our Nation’s public and private transportation options focus on getting older adults to and from medical appointments. However, healthy aging requires a holistic context of health, recognizing that factors like access to healthy food sources and social interaction also contribute to a positive quality of life.

ADS for Rural America developed three major goals in addressing these issues and challenges:
  • Improve safety on our Nation’s roadways by beginning to lay the groundwork for the safe integration of ADS
  • Work to address disparities in our Nation’s roadway system by focusing demonstrations and ADS data gathering on rural roadways
  • Demonstrate how ADS can be used to enhance mobility for transportation‐challenged populations such as the aging populations in our rural communities

To begin to address these goals and the complex, multifaceted safety challenges rural roadways pose, ADS for Rural America has developed a demonstration project to gather publicly‐available data for analysis that will help to identify risks, opportunities, and insights relevant for USDOT safety and rulemaking priorities. At the same time, ADS for Rural America will focus on testing ADS applications for the aging, transportation‐challenged rural population. Objectives include:

  • Conduct an ADS demonstration project with eight increasingly complex phases that each include ten drives of the full route to capture variability
  • Collect and publicly share data in near real‐time, making it available within one week after the completion of each drive
  • Augment data collected with markers and other information to make the dataset most useful to those accessing it, in order to more easily identify risks, opportunities, and insights relevant to the safe integration of ADS technologies
  • Provide knowledge transfer opportunities to share data and lessons learned
  • Improve public open source ADS software modules (CARMA, Autoware) utilized in support of this project by identifying and correcting bugs in software as they are found and sharing software fixes in the public domain
While 19% of Americans live in rural areas, nearly 50% of traffic fatalities occur on rural roads