Book Description

The historical variation in research studies on rural growth and highway improvement over the last 40 years is both topical and methodological. One of the key difficulties in conceptualizing the relationship between rural growth and transportation improvement has been the complexity of rural growth. Population growth is part of rural growth, but since population growth depends directly on economic growth, these concepts have been intertwined since the 1950s. similarly, economic and population growth affect land use changes. Thus, we conducted a very broad search of the literature to characterize the very multidimensional concept of rural growth and its relationship to the highway transportation system. In the report summary, we review the most significant of these studies and describe their findings. The Bibliography that follows describes each study in detail.