Health-Related Social Needs
Transportation Barriers by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · All 3,144 US counties
Transportation barriers capture adults who report a lack of reliable transportation in the past 12 months — to work, school, medical appointments, or other necessities. The measure is one of the strongest predictors in the literature of missed medical appointments and hospital readmissions, and PLACES makes it available at the county level. Rural counties dominate the top of this ranking, which reflects what residents and county-level public-health staff already know: distances are long, transit is thin, and a working car is a healthcare prerequisite.
How this ranking is built
Source: CDC PLACES 2023 release. Methodology: BRFSS survey responses pooled across years, fitted with a small-area statistical model, age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. Confidence intervals (95%) are shown for each county — wider intervals indicate more uncertainty in the modeled estimate, typically driven by smaller populations.
Lowest Transportation Barriers Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported transportation barriers prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Transportation Barriers.
Highest Transportation Barriers Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported transportation barriers prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Transportation Barriers.
What this ranking suggests
Transportation is the social-driver measure most easily addressed by local policy — county transit, ride-share partnerships, and Medicaid non-emergency medical transportation all directly move this needle. Counties at the top of this ranking are where those investments produce the most measurable downstream healthcare-utilization improvement.
Methodology notes & limitations
Estimates are statistical model outputs, not direct measurements. Small counties have wider confidence intervals; treat narrow rank differences in those rows as within-noise. Counties where the underlying population is too small to support modeling are suppressed entirely (about 1% of US counties). All measures are age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. The PLACES dataset uses BRFSS self-reported data — self-report introduces known direction-of-bias in some measures (BMI is under-reported; binge drinking is under-reported), but the bias is roughly uniform across counties so ranking comparability is preserved. See the methodology page for full data-pipeline documentation.
Data source: CDC PLACES 2023 release. Measure ID: LACKTRPT.