On a very blue and metropolitan Democratic congressperson's reasons for going everywhere, including rural America

Ro Khanna, the California congressperson (D) representing Silicon Valley, wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago: 

A robust defense of First Amendment principles online is more important than ever. Citizens in our polarized country need to have conversations with each other based on mutual respect. Suppressing speech we don’t like leaves us blind to alternative perspectives that help us see the whole, complex truth.

My belief in a marketplace of ideas is why I do interviews on media channels across the political spectrum. It’s why I engage perspectives different from mine, why I visit factory towns, rural areas and Republican-dominated congressional districts. Imagine if Democratic lawmakers were required to have town halls in deep red areas and Republicans in deep blue ones.  (emphasis added)

There will always be extremists and partisan media outlets that increase polarization and make conversations more difficult. But we would be wise to remember the teaching of the great liberal political philosopher John Rawls: “It is extremely unwise to conceive of the ideal political society as moved by scarce supererogatory moral motives alone. That leads to hating other persons and taking pleasure in condemning them as falling short.” Rawls believed we should be humble about our own certitude of truth and not rush to condemn others who we think don’t measure up. Robust public debate is the first step in America’s healing and reconciliation.

I like this philosophy.  By the way, the title for the op ed is "Twitter’s Duty to Protect Free Speech," and its subhead is "Censorship of the Hunter Biden story might have helped my party, but it was bad for our democracy."  Khanna no doubt had the opportunity to publish this high-profile piece because of comments he made some time ago about Twitter's prior censorship of a story about President Joe Biden's son.  Those comments were revealed in a story that grabbed big headlines earlier this week.  

Here's some other coverage of Khanna's outreach to surprising places like Indiana and Iowa.  His recent book, Dignity in a Digital Age, takes up the need to spread high tech opportunities to rural America.  

Peruvian president with rural roots removed after attempted coup

Peru's president, Pedro Castillo, was removed from office and arrested yesterday after he attempted a coup.  This action came a few days after the New York Times published this deep-dive story by Mitra Taj and Genevieve Glatsky on how Castillo, a former farmer himself, has failed to solve rural inequality.  The story gets at the tension between rural folks and elites, which I can't help think sounds awfully similar to what we see in the United States. 

Here's an excerpt: 

Last year, Pedro Castillo became Peru’s first left-wing president in more than a generation after campaigning on promises to address the poverty that rural Peruvians have long disproportionately suffered, and which worsened under the pandemic.

* * * 

During his campaign, Mr. Castillo raised expectations in rural Peru with talk of structural change, and promises to replace the country’s constitution, nationalize the extraction of natural resources and double spending on education.

He took a surprise lead in the first round of elections among 20 candidates with 19 percent of the vote by courting voters disenchanted with the political establishment. In the runoff, he eked out a narrow victory over Keiko Fujimori, a polarizing figure and the daughter of a former authoritarian president, Alberto Fujimori, who is in prison for human rights violations and corruption.

But today, many of Mr. Castillo’s rural supporters are struggling to purchase basic goods and services and have become disillusioned by his performance.

Cajamarca, a mostly rural region 350 miles north of Lima where Mr. Castillo was born and built his career, has long been one of the country’s poorest areas.

In communities stretching from the regional capital to Mr. Castillo’s tiny home village of San Luis de Puña, supporters like Ms. Cieza said they expected more from him.

“He said he was going to change the country,” she said. “He tricked us.”

Since taking office, Mr. Castillo has ushered in an era of controversies noteworthy for their clumsiness and frequency, while failing to make much headway on many of his campaign promises.

He has churned through more than 80 ministers and filled many posts with officials lacking relevant experience.

His administration failed to purchase fertilizer for the biggest planting season of the year, after three bids by private companies were annulled because of negligence and corruption. His government has also dragged its feet on cash payments and subsidies to low-income Peruvians.

Mr. Castillo has survived two impeachment attempts in Congress, where critics say he is not morally fit to be president.

The Peruvian leader denies wrongdoing and has denounced what he calls a “new form of a coup” orchestrated by prosecutors, lawmakers and the media. His administration has taken an initial step toward trying to dissolve Congress in response to lawmakers’ refusal to hold a vote of confidence on his government.

One congressman, Guillermo Bermejo, a close ally of Mr. Castillo, said the president’s opponents would not stop until they return power to traditional elites based in Lima, the capital.

“People with fancy last names have been carving up the ham for 200 years,’’ he said in a televised interview on Sunday.

Yet truckers and farmers in rural areas have staged protests in recent weeks over high prices for fuel, food and fertilizer.

In Cajamarca, farmers said they planted half as many potatoes this year than in the past after prices for the most widely used synthetic fertilizer nearly tripled following the start of the Ukraine war. The cost of cooking oil, rice and sugar have doubled, making them unaffordable for the poorest Peruvians. High fuel prices has made it more expensive to get products to markets.

In a slice of Peru where Mr. Castillo’s campaign slogan, “no more poor people in a rich country,” once roused cheers, today it elicits laughter.

San Luis de Puña, the rural hamlet where Mr. Castillo was born, is a five-hour drive from the regional capital along mostly unpaved roads that wind through mountains and past verdant valleys, open-pit gold mines and adobe homes without electricity or running water.

Then there's this "defense" from an elderly female farmer who lives in Castillo's home district: 

“They really hate him, don’t they? Because he’s from Tacabamba,’’ Alicia Delgado, 68, said while noting the president’s rural roots in a country where rural Peruvians have faced centuries of discrimination.

The Dismantling of Rural Legal Aid

Christopher Chavis wrote on this topic for the Daily Yonder last week.  Here's an excerpt:  

When Reagan became President in 1981, he set out to abolish the LSC and end federal funding for lawyers for the rural poor. He initially proposed abolishing the agency altogether but was rebuked. He did succeed in reducing its budget, which was a consistent theme throughout his term. He also tried to appoint a hostile board, but the Senate also rebuked that. However, this resulted in a series of recess appointments governing the agency. While Reagan did not kill the LSC, he did succeed in weakening it and introducing opposition to its very existence into Republican orthodoxy.

When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in decades, House Speaker Newt Gingrich sought to do what Ronald Reagan could not do – finally kill the LSC.

The House Republicans sought to decrease the LSC’s funding incrementally until its ultimate elimination in 1998. However, this also failed. As with Reagan’s failures, the 90s House Republicans succeeded in weakening the LSC. The Republicans passed restrictions on the types of cases the LSC-funded entities could take and effectively banned them from lobbying for and against pending legislation. These restrictions effectively banned LSC-funded entities from advocating for systemic change and limited them to only focusing on the individual issues of their clients.

Why is this especially important to the rural poor? In 2017, when Donald Trump’s Administration proposed eliminating the LSC, then-LSC President Jim Sandman noted to CNN that the LSC provides the majority of legal aid funding for 12 states: Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Utah. Many of these states have large rural populations and high rates of rural poverty.

What is more, when Legal Aid entities lack funds, they close rural offices. For example, when Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC) lost state funding in 2011, they closed three rural offices. LANC had lost funding after Republicans successfully took control of both chambers of the North Carolina legislature for the first time in a century.

Over the last 50 years, we have seen the weakening of civil legal aid in the United States. According to the Center for Law and Social Policy, the LSC was appropriated $300 Million in 1980. If its appropriation had kept up with inflation, it should have received $936,391,172 in 2017. Instead, they received $385 Million. In 2022, the LSC received $489 Million through the appropriations process. They had requested $1.01 Billion.

The federal government funds the LSC at less than half its estimated need. This lack of funding represents a considerable barrier to expanding rural legal services in this country. The Republican Party’s grudge against civil legal aid started with Ronald Reagan’s fights with rural legal aid lawyers and their decisions continue to influence lives of people in rural spaces.

On libraries, including the rural ones

New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote a few weeks ago of his gratitude for libraries, and the column included this nod to the rural variety: 

Had we had a public library in town, I would have spent my days in it, but we didn’t. The nearest one was eight miles away in the town of Arcadia, La. In fact, the town where I grew up — Gibsland, named after a man named Gibbs, whose plantation it had been — didn’t open its own library branch until this year, nearly 140 years after the town held its first elections.

Gibsland is now a dying town whose population has been declining for decades. About half as many people live there now — 773, to be exact, according to the Census Bureau in 2020 — as in the year I was born.

But particularly for these kinds of people, living in rural areas, libraries can be an incredible tool. When I was a senior in high school, I won my way to the International Science and Engineering Fair. That year, 1988, it was being held in Knoxville, Tenn. It was the first time I would fly and the first time I would travel far from home.

Determined not to expose myself as a hick, I went to the library in Arcadia and checked out every book of etiquette on the shelves. They were familiar to me, reference books, books of rules that in my mind were the only thing separating me from the appearance of refinement and sophistication. I devoured those books. 

I guess you could say that now, all that information can be found online, but high-speed broadband is not as ubiquitous as you might think. In 2019 the Pew Charitable Trusts explained that the number of Americans without broadband “could be over 163 million,” and that included 40 percent of schools and 44 percent of adults in households with incomes below $30,000.

I must applaud Joe Biden’s administration for using billions of dollars of American Rescue Plan funding to help close this digital divide, but for those who still lack high-speed internet, it is libraries that help fill in the gap.

Vera Institute publishes results of rural jails project, with detailed finding out of two states

Vera Institute's web page about the project is here, where you can download policy briefs on recent studies in Georgia and Washington State.  

Here's the Georgia policy brief and here's the Washington policy brief. Both were written by Jennifer Peirce, Madeline Bailey, and Shahd Elbushra.  The research on which the briefs was based is by researchers at the University of Georgia and Washington State University, Pullman (Jennifer Schwartz and Jennifer Sherman).

Washington

A new report by the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) shows that punitive penalties for not meeting system rules are driving jail incarceration in rural Washington, not violent or dangerous charges. What’s more, the state’s mandatory arrest policy for domestic violence calls is likely having a significant negative impact on women: most jail bookings for assault are related to domestic violence, and these charges are the second most common reason that women were jailed.

The report draws on data from five participating counties analyzed by Washington State University (WSU), highlighting an often-overlooked problem. While Washington state has one of the lowest jail incarceration rates in the United States, the number of people in rural Washington county jails on the eastern side of the state has not declined. Charges like failure to appear for court and driving with a suspended license, due to unpaid fines, missed child support payments or minor traffic infractions, are among top reasons that Washington’s rural residents are being jailed. Assault charges also stand out in jail rosters, the majority of which are misdemeanors related to domestic violence.

The disparate impact of the justice system is also evident in the data from Washington’s rural counties: both Black and Indigenous people are overrepresented in jail admissions.

This analysis highlights an opportunity for state and local policymakers to address unnecessary criminalization of poor and vulnerable people and reduce jail populations. Vera’s policy recommendations include expanding the use of citations in lieu of arrest, reducing the use of money bail, curtailing prosecutions and criminal penalties for poverty related issues, eliminating mandatory arrest for domestic violence calls, and providing support and services to avoid unnecessary jail time and address root problems.

Georgia

A new report by the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) shows that punitive responses to probation, drug use, and poverty are driving jail incarceration in rural Georgia, leading to high rates of jail incarceration and stark racial disparities.

The research, which is based on the University of Georgia’s analysis of jail roster data from seven rural Georgia counties (Decatur, Early, Greene, Habersham, Sumter, Towns, Treutlen) reveals that 83 to 93 percent of jail admissions were for nonviolent charges. Notably, drug possession charges, particularly cannabis possession, in the state are more common than drug trafficking charges. Probation violations and traffic-related offenses also stand out in the jail data, with a significant number of charges related to driving on a suspended license.

The impact of probation on Georgia jail populations is no surprise, given that the Peach State also has the country’s highest rate of people on probation, with more than 350,000 (1 in 19) adults on probation or parole supervision. Harsh enforcement of probation conditions is likely sending a significant number of people to jail for not abiding by stringent conditions of probation, and this contributes to longer stays in jail.

Racial disparities in jail incarceration are stark in all seven counties, with the proportion of Black people being booked into jails far exceeding the Black percentage of the county population.

In each of the counties, the combined number of violent and DUI charges make up a quarter or less of jail admissions. While these cases often do have public safety implications, the details are likely more complicated. More than 90 percent of the violent charges landing people in jail were assault and battery charges, 19 to 60 percent of which were domestic violence–related. Assault and battery charges can encompass misdemeanors to serious felonies, with penalties ranging from 1-20 years of incarceration. What’s more, national evidence suggests that people arrested on domestic violence related charges are often themselves survivors of domestic violence.

In total, this research reflects the degree to which current system rules and available resources discourage safe alternatives to jail detention. Vera calls on state and local policymakers to reduce rural jail incarceration, by overhauling Georgia’s probation system, strengthening pretrial services, eliminating penalties for driving with a suspended license, and investing in behavioral health resources rather than bigger jails.

Earlier posts about the Vera Institute  and its work on the rural jails boom are here.  

On an expensive effort to save an aging Italian village

Jason Horowitz reported for the New York Times reported a few days ago under the headline, "An Italian Village Hit the Jackpot. Will That Save or Destroy It?"  An excerpt follows:  

This year, Livemmo beat out dozens of other villages in the Lombardy region for a share of about €200 billion in Covid recovery funds set aside for Italy by the European Union. Italy has one of the oldest populations in Europe, and the combination of its paltry birthrate and the increased longevity of its booming population of older people has created an economic and existential crisis that has vexed successive governments.

* * * 

To make up for the loss of its lone doctor, who is retiring at the end of the month, it has also proposed telemedicine bracelets that monitor the vitals of the village’s aging residents (€183,000). It has budgeted incentives to draw more families, businesses and “creative start-ups in the sector of contemporary art, with particular focus on the theme of wood” (€1.46 million).

“It’s a unique, once-in-a-lifetime and unimaginable opportunity,” said Giovanmaria Flocchini, the mayor of the town that includes the village of Livemmo. He considered the village part of a critical experiment for Italy, but also for aging societies across Europe, to prove that an influx of cash can save towns — and all of their cultural heritage and history — from depopulation and abandonment. “I feel doubly responsible,” he said. “If it fails for us, it fails for everybody.”

* * *

The deeper challenge, though, may be that a significant, and senescing, portion of the population does not want the money in the first place.

“There is not a lot of enthusiasm in one part of the population,” the mayor said, adding, “You can’t change the minds of 80-year-olds.”

Or some 70-year-olds.

“My fear is that the whole town will be changed. We’ll be invaded by people we don’t know,” Graziella Scuri, 73, an owner of one of Livemmo’s five restaurants, said as she spooned out homemade casoncelli pasta doused in butter. She added that a defining character trait of the hard-working, and often isolated locals was “we’re a little closed.”

The Washington Post ran this story by Chico Harlan in October titled, "Italy has 334 Most Beautiful Villages.  Can Their Beauty Survive?"   Here's an excerpt: 

At this point I’ve been to dozens of hill towns across Italy, including 20 on the Most Beautiful List, and often I get the impression that their residents are the last courageous holdouts, fighting for something that is already half gone.

No matter how small the village, they host festivals and summer concerts that go late into the night. They offer daily gatherings for cards and aperitivi at the central piazza.

But there are also so many abandoned homes — the result of more than a century of rural depopulation. Who wouldn’t want to live in a storybook medieval town on a hill? But also: How many of us actually could?

This is from journalist Harlan's visit to the village of Abbateggio, in the Abruzzo region:   

With excitement, another Abbateggio man, Giacinto De Thomasis, took me on a tour through the oldest part of the village, cutting this way and that, through little passageways he said he knew from playing hide-and-seek as a child. We came to a narrow stairwell that sliced between two homes, and at the end of the stairs there was nothing but a drop-off and a green panorama — the end of town. De Thomasis pointed out the fortified exterior of the village.

“This area,” he said, “used to be a castle.”

But whatever it used to be, the houses on either side of the stairwell were now in disrepair. Same with a home across the street, its old wooden door swung half-open, decades of rubble inside. Up and down the street hung For Sale signs, and even the properties that looked tidy from the outside, De Thomasis said, were nothing more than “shells.”

“No water. No electricity. Unlivable,” he said.

He knew because he’d been looking to buy. And he’d been looking to buy because he hadn’t lived in Abbateggio for decades — having been effectively forced out, at age 19, by a dearth of available jobs.

Another story about rural population loss and rural aging in Europe, this one out of Spain, is here.  

Brookings Institute launches "Reimagine Rural" podcast

Anthony Pipa, a Senior Fellow at Brookings, is the host of the new Reimagine Rural podcast.  The series is introduced thusly: 

While the dominant narrative regarding rural America is one of decline and division, Reimagine Rural is a new podcast that visits rural towns across the United States that are experiencing positive change and explores how public investment in rural people and places can lead to increased and equitable prosperity.

Hosted by Tony Pipa, a scholar in the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution and a product of rural America, each episode features local voices telling the story of progress in their community and considering the intersection with policy and public resources.

The first episode (published Nov. 22) is out of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, population 6,942, where Tony Pipa grew up, in the central/east central part of the state, the Susquehanna region.   Here's an excerpt that intrigued me because of its focus on a place's identity--in this case the need to shift from a work-focused identity (in their case, coal mining) to one based in tourism.  

So, think about taking a coal-region town who’s very much brought up in that hard work mentality. And we need our mills and we need our coal and we need to just work hard and transitioning that into a tourism destination. And that’s what we’re doing here. So, it’s been a struggle for a lot of the individuals who have grown up and have been bred in this hard work mentality to really be that destination.

So, about a year and a half ago, the city passed an ordinance to allow a portal so that the AOAA riders could ride right into our town. We were the first city in the country to do that. Many other villages and communities have, but we’re told we were the first city to allow that. Now we have ATVs driving up and down our streets. I personally love it because that’s bringing revenue. That again, changing to that tourism mentality is difficult. But let’s embrace that because that is our future.

Don't miss this inaugural episode.  It has me looking forward to more episodes in this series focused on rural economic development and what it means to invest not only in rural individuals, but in rural places and regions.  And on that note, here's a November 29 tweet from Tony Pipa: 

I'm focused on the bit that says "for both Ds and Rs, the policies are generally focused on individuals.  But places, esp. rural places, need investment, too."  The first part of the tweet quotes an NPR report on the rural vote, by Ximena Bustillo, "But rural advocates say that the party often fails to communicate policies to rural voters." 

On remote work for American Indians and Alaska natives

Marketplace, from American Public Media, did this story a week ago, "Telework could help tribes curb outmigration, but Native workers are being left behind."  Here's an excerpt:  

Maleah Nore has a job she’s passionate about, promoting mental health and working on suicide prevention in Native communities. But she’d like to do that work closer to the rural southeast Alaskan village where she grew up.

“Part of the reason that we’re experiencing such drain in our villages is that people are forced to move to these huge hubs,” she said, like the Portland metro area where she lives now.

A hybrid model allows Nore to sometimes work from her home office, but not from her Tlingit homelands.

“In order to do the work that we need to do to help our people and get further in this world, we have to leave our villages,” she said. “That is just counterproductive.”

Because distance makes it harder to be a good relative and community member, Nore said.

* * *

Research from the Brookings Institution and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’ Center for Indian Country Development finds that the remote work revolution could have unique benefits for tribal communities and economies, but that Native workers are being left behind.

“No one is accessing the remote work environment as little as the American Indian/Alaska Native population,” said Matthew Gregg, a senior economist at the Minneapolis Fed and an author of the report.

At the height of the pandemic, Gregg said, data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows 23% of Native workers were teleworking because of COVID-19, compared to 31% of white workers.

“One of the key reasons is that there’s employment differences between whites and Native Americans,” Gregg said.

Native people are overrepresented in fields we’ve come to know as “essential,” such as health care, education and service work, and underrepresented in office jobs that are more likely to allow telework.

More than two years into the pandemic, Gregg said the telework gap has narrowed, but those occupational differences no longer explain the gap.

“In fact, within occupations, there’s a racial disparity,” he said.

Gregg and his co-author, Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at the Brookings Institution, have some ideas about what else might be going on.

“The first is access — or I should say lack of access — to broadband internet,” Maxim said.

On the LGBTQ experience in "red" California

Hailey Branson-Potts reports for the Los Angeles Times.  Here's an excerpt: 

After five people were shot dead in a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colo., Matthew Grigsby thought about Club 501.

It was the only gay bar in Redding, a Northern California city of 93,000 that, like Colorado Springs, is deeply religious and conservative.

There, Grigsby felt comfortable holding hands or dancing with another man.

Club 501 closed this summer, leaving Grigsby and other LGBTQ people without a place where they could be themselves. The news from Club Q in Colorado Springs was another gut punch.

“There’s no safe place anywhere,” Grigsby, 53, said, his voice shaking. “It doesn’t matter where we are or what we do. People are going to come for us.”

In politically red stretches of California — from the old logging towns in the north through the dusty farmlands of the Central Valley — the Colorado Springs massacre was yet another devastating reminder of how difficult and lonely it can be to be queer in conservative America.  

Longing for one's rural roots

The New York Times published a fascinating piece this week on the challenges facing baby boomers and Gen X'ers as they age, while living alone.  One of the folks featured was Mary Felder, who owns a home in the Strawberry Mansion area of Philadelphia.  Her very urban present implicates a rural past that she's started to long for:

Mary Felder, 65, raised her children, now grown, in her rowhouse in Philadelphia. Her home has plenty of space for one person, but upkeep is expensive on the century-old house.

* * *

The constraints are especially severe for many older Black Americans, for whom the legacy of redlining and segregation has meant that homeownership has not generated as much wealth. The percentage of people living alone in large houses is highest in many low-income, historically Black neighborhoods. In those areas, many homes are owned by single, older women.

One of them is Ms. Felder of Strawberry Mansion, a neighborhood in Philadelphia. She and her ex-husband bought their two-story brick rowhouse in the mid-1990s for a song, after it was damaged in a fire.

While raising three children, Ms. Felder worked a series of jobs, including retail, hotel housekeeping and airport security. She retired in 2008 and has lived by herself for more than a decade, though her sisters, children and grandchildren live nearby.

Maintaining her home is a challenge. In rainstorms, she sometimes had to use every piece of fabric in the house to sop up water pouring down a kitchen wall. And she worries about her safety.

At times, she dreams about relocating to small-town South Carolina, where she was born and raised.

She imagines a small home there, perhaps even a trailer.

But the median value of a home in her neighborhood was $59,000, according to recent census data. Ms. Felder thinks she could sell her house and net about $40,000.

“That’s not enough” to retire down south, she said, sighing, sitting in her living room filled with plants.

Ms. Felder is a fixture in her neighborhood, keeping watch over it, and has received help from Habitat for Humanity to repair her roof.

But in September, living alone became harder.

While she was cleaning the trash out of a nearby alley with neighbors, a masked gunman looked her in the eyes and shot her twice in the legs.

Ms. Felder had no clue who shot her, and there has been no arrest. She recovered at her daughter’s home across town, where the ground floor has a bedroom and bathroom, unlike in her own house.

Felder still has not spent a night in her house in Strawberry Mansion because she is afraid.

States steering more money to rural roads

That's from a Pew Report published earlier this month. An excerpt follows: 

[A] growing number of states have been focusing their attention on improving rural roads.

Many rural roads carry heavy trucks and farm equipment, and some haven’t been repaved in decades, transportation officials say. With many state budgets healthy and new money arriving from the federal COVID-19 stimulus and bipartisan infrastructure laws, states are spending more.

In June, for example, Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills touted a $9.2 million project to revitalize the rural highway corridors that lead to the state’s western mountains, where several ski slopes are located.

In Texas, the Department of Transportation plans to invest $14 billion over the next decade on rural projects. That’s a 600% hike in planned rural funding compared with just seven years ago, according to Alvin New, a Texas Transportation Commission member.

And in Oklahoma, transportation officials received a $41.5 million federal loan earlier this year; it will fund nearly half the cost of a rural safety improvement project in eight counties.

“Rural areas are absolutely critical to the functioning of the nation’s economy, and you need a safe, reliable transportation network,” said Rocky Moretti, director of policy and research at TRIP, a nonprofit transportation research organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. “If the system deteriorates to the point that it becomes difficult to move trucks that carry food and products, that’s a big problem.”

And for the tens of millions of residents who live in rural communities and use those roads for commuting, shopping, going to school and medical appointments, it’s critical that the roads are in decent condition, Moretti said.

“The worse the shape the roads are in, the more the cost of operating a vehicle increases,” he said. “That impacts the consumer.”

An October report by TRIP noted that the United States faces a $109 billion backlog for rural road and highway rehabilitation, such as repaving and reconstruction, and a $36 billion backlog for rural roadway enhancements, such as safety improvements.

The report said that in 2020, 12% of major rural roads were rated in poor condition, 19% in mediocre condition and 17% in fair condition.

The report called America’s rural transportation system “the first and last link” in the supply chain from farm to market. It said the supply chain issues that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic heightened the importance of the rural road system when it comes to moving goods and products.

“As the nation’s major rural roads and highways continue to age, they will reach a point where routine paving and maintenance will not be adequate to keep pavement surfaces in good condition and costly reconstruction of the roadway and its underlying surfaces will become necessary,” the report stated.

And here's a piece on transportation issues in rural Montana, this one about how to better serve veterans in accessing health care through the VA.   

Here's a recent Washington Post piece on the prospect of paving a long Australian road, the Outback Way, which runs from Laverton to Winton. Some 750 miles of it are still unpaved.    

Yesterday, the New York Times started covering the latest data on U.S. traffic deaths.