How to Build Better Public Transit Systems Across Appalachian Kentucky
For starters, figure out the unique needs of your town's population.
We spun our wheels earlier this week in an attempt to understand why so many small towns across central and eastern Kentucky have focused on creating ordinances for expensive, plaything golf carts on public roads over investing in public transportation.
Today, we’re continuing our conversation around the intersection of transit and well-being across Appalachian Kentucky in a chat with Alycia Bayne.
Bayne is a principal research scientist for the Nonpartisan and Objective Research Organization (NORC) at the University of Chicago, an independent institution that has an 80-year history of delivering reliable data and analysis to guide policy decisions. She works within both the public health research department and the Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis, an arm of NORC that studies policy issues that impact health in rural America including transportation and other social determinants of health.
I initially stumbled upon Bayne’s work through a rural transportation toolkit that she helped develop for the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy. The toolkit brings together research on promising evidence-based programs that can increase access to transportation in rural communities. The hope is that it will help rural practitioners replicate what has been found to work so that communities aren’t tasked with reinventing the wheel. As Bayne puts it, “[Communities] have a sort-of menu of options to choose from and guidance on how to adapt what they have locally based on evidence.”
Of course, the rural transportation toolkit is entirely based on data—not advocacy work—but here at The Goldenrod, we also wanted to give you a couple of ways to get the conversation started within your community. Download the coloring book pages below that are all about advocating for rural transportation in your central or eastern Kentucky town, then color them how you like; hang them up at a community center; and tell the city commission that you need a better bus route!
Read on to learn how rural Kentucky communities can work to implement better transit structures in their towns, hamlets and hollers. And if you want to get extra wonky, check out the Rural Transportation Toolkit here.
(Download the full-sized advocacy coloring sheet here.)
Sarah Baird: How can Appalachian Kentuckians begin to go about addressing rural transportation issues within their communities?
Alycia Bayne: We know that over 90 percent of passenger trips are in private vehicles in rural communities compared to 84 percent in urban areas. We know public transit is limited in rural communities. We also know that it takes a longer distance to get to your job; or a doctor; or a hospital; or a school; or other services. A lot of my work has really focused on people who can't drive or who are aging—and perhaps aging out of driving—and what they can do if they don't have access to public transit in rural communities. It’s important to take into consideration those unique barriers when you’re starting any conversation. So, what can people in rural places do? My response would be not to focus on the individual, but focus on how communities can put together innovative transportation solutions.
SB: Do you feel like there’s a sense of defeatism, in some ways, around rural transportation—that people don’t know how to go about addressing change?
AB: I think transportation is a difficult challenge because you’re dealing with not only the systems and resources that you have in the community, but also trying to adapt what you have to meet the needs of your population. And every rural community is unique. If you've seen one rural community, you've seen one rural community.
Even where there are few options, what we've found through our research is that communities can think more broadly and begin to develop a community system that coordinates and leverages existing transportation programs and tries to match the services offered in the community to what they know the needs, and preferences, are of their population.
The first step is really trying to understand: what are those needs? So, conducting a needs assessment—including older adults and people who have disabilities that perhaps prevent them from driving—and from there leveraging the local resources that are in the community. I think that's an important solution that we've identified through our work.
I also think building a strong network of transportation partners is helpful. And really the goal here is complimenting programs that exist in the communities, and bringing those programs together so they’re not competing for existing resources. It’s about leveraging what you have, building strong partnerships that exist in the community, and trying to match the services you can offer to the needs of the population.
(Download the full-sized advocacy coloring sheet here.)
SB: Appalachian Kentucky is graying very quickly. How can community transportation systems best think about ways to serve older rural populations?
AB: I led a three-year study for the CDC that we just wrapped up in 2020 where we actually studied the barriers and facilitators of older adults, people 65-plus, and whether or not they would use a rideshare service. It was very interesting because people often think about rideshare services as only for-profit services like Uber and Lyft. But our research found that there are nearly a thousand rideshare services across the US, and more than 900 of those services are nonprofit organizations that are serving the needs of their own communities. They are mostly grassroots services operated by different organizations that use a combination of paid and volunteer drivers, and that is what is happening in rural communities. What we see is neighbors helping neighbors. There’s a network out there that may not be a formal network, but it is how people are getting around.
Certainly, there are still unmet transportation needs, specifically for older adults in rural communities. Some nonprofit services may only be available, for example, to take you to a medical appointment. But we know that rural residents need transportation to be able to see family; participate in volunteer opportunities or employment; and engage socially. Those are all important aspects of living, and transportation is a social determinant of health that impacts your quality of life.
Based on what we found, rideshare is a promising alternative for older adults in rural communities to address that.
SB: What’s the data showing for how access will change in the next five or 10 years when it comes to transportation in rural areas?
AB: I think that there will continue to be a lot of interest in rural rideshare services. We also think it’s important to disseminate best practices from the experiences of rural practitioners so that other communities can learn from them. And that's very much what we do in our rural toolkit. So there are models to improve access to transportation; models to overcome transportation barriers; and models to improve transportation safety. It’s going to be important to continue to build the evidence base of what works in those domains.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
We’ll be back tomorrow for *paid subscribers only* with the first installment of our legislative superlatives. Will they be a little snarky? Probably! Make the leap behind the paywall to find out: