25th Annual Highway Report: Rural Arterial Pavement Condition

Rural Other Principal Arterials (ROPA) are two to four-lane roadways connecting different cities or regions.

The condition of major rural arterials improved slightly from 2016 to 2018,  by about 0.13 percentage points. Overall, about 1.23% of the ROPA system—1,068 miles out of 86,926—was reported to be in poor condition (Table 13, Percent Rural Other Principal Arterial Mileage in Poor Condition, 2018, Figure 8).

This compares with about 1.36% (1,173 of 86,113 miles) in 2016, the last time this assessment was completed. (It should be noted that as cities grow, the urbanized area around them grows as well. As this occurs, roads near cities are often reclassified from rural to urban. If these roads were in good condition already, their reclassification has the effect of increasing the percentage of rural roads in poor condition.)

Between 2016 and 2018 most states saw minor changes in ROPA pavement condition. Forty-one states saw decreases/increases of poor condition mileage of one percentage point or less, with 22 states seeing decreases, 16 states seeing increases, and three states seeing no change.

Of the remaining nine states, five had changes of less than 2%. However, the percentage of the ROPA system in poor condition in Massachusetts, Arkansas, and Wisconsin decreased by 3.2, 2.2, and 2.1 points, respectively, while the poor mileage in Maine increased by 5.3 points.

Rural Other Principal Arterial Pavement Condition — Percent in Poor Condition