It is a freezing day in January 2024. 18-year-old Hannah Gross cannot leave her farm because fresh snow consumes the gravel roads that are too dangerous to travel on, and no one can get to her family’s farm.

Every time it snows, Gross and her family have to wait out the storm on their farm in Amana, Iowa, until her grandpa can come with the tractor to plow. For the Gross family and many other families around the state, accessible roads are a luxury.

Driving outside of Iowa City in any direction, chances are corn and soybean fields will take over both sides of the road. In 2022, the total farmland for the 36 million-acre state was 30.5 million acres, according to the USDA.

The abundance of farmland around the state not only brings in crops and a bustling agriculture industry but also presents unique challenges for the Iowans who call rural America home.

Transportation on rural roads can pose a deadly challenge for those traveling. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, or DOT, 80 percent of the nation’s roadways that Americans travel on are rural. Because of this, 60 percent of traffic fatalities occur on rural roads.

“While a smaller portion of Americans live in rural areas, half of all fatalities occur on rural roadways. Automated vehicles are going to improve safety. That’s one of the key benefits that we’re told is going to come from vehicle automation,” Omar Ahmad said.

Ahmad is the deputy director of the Driving Safety and Research Institute at the University of Iowa and the project director for Automated Driving Service, also known as ADS, for rural America.

The project’s goal is to test the use of automated driving technologies on rural roads in hopes that the data will lead to automated vehicles on the road, which will help assist in day-to-day operations, barriers, and dangers for rural Iowans.

“In rural areas, when you’ve got folks with mobility issues, then it’s an extra challenge. If someone can ride in a car, they have a lot more options, but if they use a wheelchair, then their options for how they can get around are really limited,” Dawn Alam said.

Alam is the director of Johnson County Seats, an organization that provides transportation to underserved populations that don’t have access to public transportation. Alam has been with the program for 16 years, originally joining to become a casual driver after she had her son.

“I really feel like transit is kind of in similar ways to child care, I guess, a big equalizer,” Alam said.

For rural populations, transit and child care can go hand in hand. For Gross and her siblings, the half-hour drive to Clear Creek Amana Elementary School was hard to juggle for her parents, as no buses came out to her farm.

“[Driving] was actually a big inconvenience for my parents, and they had to drive me to elementary school. Everyone else that went to my school, the bus came to their house,” Gross said.

Because of travel, day-to-day life takes extra time for Gross, who is active in school and her community, participating in Future Farmers of America, showing and keeping livestock, beekeeping, and many other activities.

The isolation can be damaging for older rural populations who don’t have the luxury of socialization at school and other activities. Even just making it to their doctor’s appointments and grocery store trips can be a day-long commitment.

Ahmad said the importance of this project in relation to UI Health Care.

“The University of Iowa isn’t the easiest place to get to, especially if you live in rural Iowa and don’t have help. For some people who live in rural areas, this may be a day-long affair to go from where they are to their appointment,” Ahmad said.

Alam and the team at Joco Seats have already been working to combat this issue. Their mission, Alam said, is to improve the quality of life for at-risk rural populations through transportation.

“I think when you look at older people, people with disabilities, people without cars, who live in rural areas, social isolation is a pretty big barrier to quality of life. I think, ultimately, that our goal is to try to meet the needs of as many people as we can,” Alam said.

Lack of resources, such as drivers, can be a barrier to the growing need for transportation in rural communities.

“With time and resource restraints, it can be hard to keep up with the need,” Alam said.

RELATED: UI Driving Safety Research Institute unveils autonomous vehicle designed for rural roads

The ADS for Rural America project aims to improve research to expand access to transportation using automated systems that don’t require drivers.

“We want to see this project grow. To go from just testing into maybe a deployment of an actual service that serves rural areas and rural Americans. I would love to see something like that happen in the next five to 10 years,” Ahmad said.

The project, originally granted funding in 2019 before COVID-19 hit and halted research, has been a passion project for Ahmad and his team.

“We basically work with our technology partners to put [out] all the sensors and computers that would be needed to support the automation software. Then, we did several months of testing in simulation and on the road on the actual roadways that we were going to be collecting data,” Ahmad said.

With the data collected, Ahmad hopes that researchers nationwide will use it to improve transportation in rural areas.

“We drove those rural roadways over and over, in different lighting conditions and different kinds of [vehicles] in different times of the day, in different seasons, during rain, and sometimes even during a little bit of snow,” Ahmad said. “We collected a lot of data on this automated vehicle on rural roadways, and then we’re now in the process of publicly sharing that data for the next five years.”

The sharing of data, according to Ahmad, will hopefully lead to an increase of awareness and an eventual solution for at-risk populations and people like Gross and her friends, who have to navigate dangerous rural roads at a young age.

“I did have a friend who was in an accident that was pretty bad. That was pretty upsetting, just because people think that because they’re on gravel roads, they don’t have to look both ways, or they don’t have to fully stop at stop signs,” Gross said. “There are giant trucks for, like, livestock or gas and stuff that are hauled through. They’re actually more unsafe than people think. If you’re not experienced, like driving on gravel, it actually can be really dangerous.”

Ahmad and his team are looking to flip the script so rural Iowans and rural populations are not forgotten.

“You can’t easily find a taxi or an Uber in rural areas, right? But that doesn’t mean that we don’t take care of those folks. Automated vehicles can potentially be, one day, part of that solution,” Ahmad said.