Urbanization of Rural Roads
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Case Study: Urbanization of Rural Roads
The Sacramento Region contains some of the fastest growing communities in California. From 1990 to 2005, the region added nearly 595,000 people, an increase of 37%. Still, sparsely populated rural and agricultural land uses make up nearly 90% of the region’s land area. The roads serving these parts of the region are designed to manage low-volume rural traffic and frequently serve as important farm to market routes or provide access for moving heavy farm equipment. However, recent growth at and around the edges of urban development has begun to change the structure of once isolated rural communities.
Historically, rural communities have had economies based on agriculture or natural resource extraction (timber, grazing, mining). Increasingly, rural communities are feeling the pressure to grow as urban boundaries spread outward and people willing to commute long distances to jobs have fled city and suburban living for the additional elbow room rural living affords. In the 15 year period mentioned above, approximately 146,000 acres of farmland were transitioned to urban or rural residential and commercial land uses.
As part of the RUCS study, aRural Perspective on Land Usesummarizes current policies that affect rural land use in the Sacramento Region and begins to explore how these policies and development standards encourage or discourage agricultural uses, urbanization, rural home sites, or habitat conservation. This issue brief focuses on how and when to prepare rural transportation infrastructure to meet increasingly urban travel demands.
Defining Rural and Rural-Urban Interface Roadways
To better understand where and how challenges will appear, it is important to identify what makes roads rural or urban. What are the appropriate measures for identifying roads entering a transition period between the two? County Circulation Elements or Regional Transportation Plans are a useful place to start, but road classifications are typically limited to broad design and purpose characteristics. The Federal Highway Administration offers some general guidelines for identifying rural principle and minor arterial systems and collector and local road systems. All of these sources are useful for building a preliminary definition for rural and urban roads. However, some flushing out and expansion of these definitions is important for building an analytical framework for studying the transportation infrastructure at the rural-urban interface (See Attachment A).
Figure 1: Comparison of Typical Rural and Urban Traffic Volumes
Source: SACOG, October 2008.
Volumes are based on scaled averages of several roadways from within urbanized Sacramento County (for the urban volumes), and several roadways in rural and agricultural production areas in the rest of the region.
Figure 1 illustrates the differences in traffic volumes on a typical “urban” roadway of about 20,000 vehicles per day, and a typical “rural” roadway of about 2,000 vehicle per day. Obviously one difference is in the total volume; roadways with volumes or 10,000 or more are common in urban areas, but very rare in rural areas. The typical urban pattern includes strongly defined peaks during commute hours, and those peaks may be directionally different (i.e. the PM peak in volume is the opposite direction of the AM peak, etc.). The typical rural pattern, in addition to lower volumes overall, has little-to-no observable peaking, with traffic volumes spread out more evenly over the course of the day.
The following descriptions attempt to classify generally by unique characteristics, the differences between several types of roads common in the Sacramento Region.
Rural Roads
Rural roads are typically 2 lanes with no curbs or raised medians. Land uses adjacent to rural roads are typically some combination of productive agriculture, very low density residential, open space, and protected area. An additional important identifier for rural roads is traffic volume. A rural road should not have noticeable differences in traffic volumes during peak and off-peak hours that would imply its use as a commuter route. Finally, rural roads maintain consistent road geometry and traffic controls.
Urban Roads
In contrast, urban roads can exhibit large fluctuations in peak and off-peak traffic loads because they are frequently used by commuters coming and going between home and job centers. Urban roads often have more than 2 lanes and include curbs, raised medians, traffic signalization, and, in the case of highways, ramp metering. Adjacent land uses are typically urban with medium to high densities. In some cases, a road may have rural adjacent land uses, but will be considered urban if it is a major commuter route between two urban areas and exhibits the physical characteristics common to urban roads.
Rural-Urban Interface Roadways
A road is considered transitional or a rural-urban interface roadway if it serves rural adjacent land uses, has design characteristics meant for low-volume rural traffic, but exhibits considerable fluctuations in peak and off-peak traffic volume. In these cases, it is likely that nearby development or bottlenecks on major commuter routes are causing drivers to utilize a particular rural road as a supplementary commuter route. In some instances, recreational opportunities can create conflicts as they draw traffic from urban areas onto rural roads (i.e. Cache Creek Casino in Yolo County). Rural-Urban Interface Roadways also have inconsistent road geometry and traffic controls.
Base Line/Riego Road
Base Line/Riego Road is an example of a quickly transitioning rural road. The road is an east-west thoroughfare in Placer and Sutter Counties connecting SR 99 and I-80. For most of its length, Baseline/Riego is two lanes with narrow gravel shoulders and only a couple adjoining roads. The adjacent land uses are primarily agricultural with some rural residential. Nearby growth and traffic congestion on Roseville’s commuter routes have redirected some traffic to the road making it an important commercial and commuter route providing access from Roseville to the State Highway System and the Sacramento Airport. Figure 2 
Rural Farm-to-Market Roads
A fourth type of road that will be important in any study of rural urban interactions is the rural farm-to-market road. These types of roads exhibit high goods movement vehicle traffic during peak harvest seasons with a corresponding drop during off-season months. Farm-to-market roads originate in agricultural land uses and serve as connections to food processing/distribution centers and urban markets. The physical and design characteristics of these roads can fluctuate between rural and urban traits.
Challenges
At the crossroads of expanding urban development and existing rural communities, several challenges present themselves. At the forefront of these challenges is the question of how to prepare rural infrastructure to meet the demands of increased traffic caused by new development. From the travel demand side, rural roads, originally designed as farm-to-market, low-volume roads, must now serve additional purposes including high volume commuter, recreational, and/or intra-regional traffic. Frequently, the increased traffic volumes are caused by spillover from congested roads near the exterior of urbanized areas. This often leaves rural communities that contain small tax bases, bring in little developer fee revenue, or aren’t priorities for other funding, unable to pay for needed road improvements and more extensive maintenance programs.
In addition, lifestyle and occupational differences between rural and urban residents can make prioritizing road improvements difficult for planning agencies. Many rural residents want to maintain the unique character of their towns and roads while others are excited by the prospect of new economic opportunities. For example, where sidewalks may be the norm in many urban communities, rural residents may view them as unnecessary and detrimental to maintaining rural character.
The Federal Highway Administration identifies the following five issues as fundamental challenges at the urban-rural interface1
- Areas must address the issue of supporting economic growth and development or attempting to limit growth to preserve the rural character of the area. In reality this usually involves a balanced approach between the two objectives.
- Traffic growth in many areas is making it difficult to keep up with maintenance and preservation on roads and bridges on and off the federal-aid system.
- Funding is difficult for capacity improvements to roads where traffic growth warrants improvements, especially for those roads outside the federal-aid system.
- Environmental concerns are increasing as “sprawl” pushes outward from urban areas.
- There is often a lack of funding for providing adequate public transportation choices to accommodate travel demand growth or job access.
Next Steps: Opportunities and Innovations
As part of the Rural-Urban Connections Strategies project, SACOG would like to explore the potential opportunities and innovations for addressing the challenges identified above. The following questions/statements will help guide how SACOG approaches this next step:
- Traffic counts targeting rural areas in the region will be available in early to mid November and again in March or April. These counts will help answer the following questions:
- Where do important transitional roads exist?
- Where are important farm-to-market corridors?
- What additional characteristics would be useful in identifying differences between urban, rural, rural-urban interface, and farm-to-market roads?
- What programs or opportunities exist for helping rural communities, cities, and counties deal with costly upgrades to rural infrastructure made necessary by surrounding development?
- Much focus is put on increasing capacity on transitional roads to adapt to their increasing use, but what policies exist to help maintain important rural roads in their current state. Documents such as Elk Grove’s Rural Road Policies and Standards are one possibility. Are there other examples in the region?
