As transportation practices evolve, keeping up with new models, data, technical analysis, and legal statutes can feel overwhelming. Rural agencies also have a community context that lends to additional unique challenges.

Working with rural communities, we understand the need for cost-effective approaches to address transportation analysis requirements while complying with legal and technical expectations, such as the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Recent CEQA changes have expanded expectations for transportation analysis related to wildfire evacuation and vehicle miles of travel (VMT). These are challenging subjects to analyze for any agency, and even more so, for those without advanced data, the models needed, or the specialized expertise to apply them.

So, how can rural agencies close the gap between the new transportation planning expectations and their resource reality?

Fehr & Peers aims to remove the anxiety and complexity from the analysis, and instead offer simple, effective, and scalable solutions for practitioners working in rural communities. As such, we have prepared the following cost-effective web resources for rural planning.