Arkansas Ranks 28th in the Nation Cost-Effectiveness and Condition

According to the Annual Highway Report by Reason Foundation, this is a 15-spot worsening from Arkansas’ ranking of

13th overall in the last evaluation of the condition, safety, and costs of roads and bridges in all 50 states.

In safety and condition categories, Arkansas’ highways rank 40th in urban Interstate pavement condition, 39th in rural Interstate pavement condition, 30th in urban arterial pavement condition, 36th in rural arterial pavement condition, 23rd in structurally deficient bridges, 46th in urban fatality rate, and 43rd in rural fatality rate.

Arkansas ranks 4th out of the 50 states in traffic congestion, and its drivers spend about seven hours a year stuck in traffic congestion.

In spending and cost-effectiveness, Arkansas ranks 25th in capital and bridge disbursements, which are the costs of building new roads and bridges and widening existing ones.

Arkansas ranks 6th in maintenance spending, such as the costs of repaving roads and filling potholes. Arkansas’ administrative disbursements, including office spending that doesn’t make its way to roads, ranks 3rd nationwide.

The category in which the state improved the most from the previous report was urbanized area congestion (from 25th to 4th).

Arkansas worsened the most in urban fatality rate (from 7th to 46th).

Compared to neighboring and nearby states, Arkansas’ overall highway performance is better than Oklahoma’s (39th) and Louisiana’s (46th) but worse than Tennessee’s (5th).

Comparing its overall performance to similarly populated states, Arkansas ranks behind Kansas (22nd) but ahead of Iowa (31st).

Arkansas’ highway system ranks 28th out of 50 states overall this year, ranked 13th in last year’s report, and ranked 32nd in the nation five years ago in 2019.

“In terms of improving the road condition and performance categories, Arkansas should focus on improving urban Interstate pavement conditions, given it is Arkansas’ lowest performance-focused ranking,” said Baruch Feigenbaum, lead author of the 28th Annual Highway Report and senior managing director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation. “Arkansas should also make it a priority to reduce the number of deaths on its urban and rural roads, given its fatality rates are some of the worst in the nation.”

*2021 data
The Annual Highway Report is based on spending and performance data submitted by state highway agencies to the federal government and urban congestion data from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute for 2020 as well as bridge condition data from the Better Roads inventory for 2021. For more details on the calculation of each of the 13 performance measures used in the report, as well as the overall performance measure, please refer to the appendix in the main report. The report’s dataset includes Interstate, federal, and state roads, but not county or local roads. All rankings are based on performance measures that are ratios rather than absolute values: the financial measures are disbursements per mile, the fatality rate is fatalities per 100 million vehicle-miles of travel, the urban congestion measure is the annual delay per auto commuter, and the others are percentages. For example, the state ranking 1^st in structurally deficient bridges has the smallest percentage of structurally deficient bridges, not the smallest number of structurally deficient bridges.