5. Summary and conclusions
Rural residents often face a variety of challenges in meeting their need to access key destinations, obtain and keep employment, attend school, receive health care, and engage in social and recreational activities. People that are unable to meet these needs safely, efficiently, and affordably can be considered transportationdisadvantaged. Identifying who these people are and developing solutions to improve their mobility is not a straightforward task. In many states, including North Carolina, state DOTs rely on sociodemographic variables derived from Census data to predict what locations might contain socially vulnerable populations that are likely to be transportation-disadvantaged. However, our research shows that while these traditional variables were a helpful starting point in our efforts to identify instances of transportation disadvantage, they failed to capture many TD individuals that were either not identifiable via traditional Census markers, or not spatially clustered, or both. Examples include community college students in Beaufort County, non-driving elderly widows in Graham County, and seasonal farm workers in Wilson County. Local knowledge from professionals familiar with the TD landscape in their communities was essential for identifying these populations. Our research uncovered a number of themes on transportation disadvantage that were consistent across our study area. For example, informal transit services based on social networks is a common strategy to cope with transportation disadvantage across our five-county sample. Also, many of the populations we investigated rely heavily on public transportation and paratransit systems, however limited, or on securing rides from friends and family. Paratransit use, however, can be hampered by a lack of understanding about how paratransit works, restrictive eligibility requirements or limitations on trip purposes eligible for paratransit dollars. Frequency, reliability, and cost may also affect the feasibility of paratransit use by some residents. With many key amenities and services located far from home for some people, public transportation, even when available, may simply involve too much of a time commitment for some. At the same time, we uncovered striking differences in how transportation experts across counties and across professional roles view the travel challenges their service populations face and the options they have for responding to their needs. For example, access to health care was a particularly prominent issue in Graham County, which lacks both a hospital and a dialysis treatment center but has a disproportionately high number of residents with kidney disease. Geographic barriers were raised repeatedly by key informants in Beaufort County, where a wide river splits the county and separates many workers from several key employers. Furthermore, as illustrated by the variation in code dominance by professional groups, a range of perspectives is necessary to convey the complexity and nature of TD—a multidimensional phenomenon that reflects local conditions. Thus, the problem of TD takes on different meanings for different people and in different contexts. Likewise, the success of policies and programs intended to help reduce TD is likely to be highly dependent on local contextual factors.
