Introduction to and Description of the 2004 (Version 2) Rural-Urban Commuting Areas (RUCAs)
This project will describe the new Version 2.0 of the RUCA geographic taxonomy developed at the WWAMI Rural Health Research Center by Drs. Hart and Morill with funding from the federal Office of Rural Health Policy and by Dr. Cromartie at the USDA’s Economic Research Service. The RUCAs were designed to define rural and urban based on the Census Bureau’s definitions of Urbanized Areas and Urban Clusters, and on work commuting patterns. The RUCA taxonomy is a tool based on the sizes of cities and towns and their functional relationships as measured by work commuting flows. Basing the codes on Census Tracts allows codes to be more geographically specific than larger county-based definitions and avoids issues associated with the heterogenity of these larger units. A ZIP code approximation version was also created and has been widely applied to rural programs and research. Version 1.11 of the RUCAs was developed with 1990 Census data and 1998 ZIP code areas. Work on creating the Census Tract Version 2.0 was completed in February 2005 and the ZIP code version, which assigns RUCAs to more than 30,000 ZIP code areas, was completed in July, 2005.
The product for this project will be a working paper and journal article that introduces Version 2.0 to the health care constituency and those involved in rural health, so that this tool can be more widely disseminated and applied. Data will be presented by RUCA code aggregations, Census region, Census division, state and other combinations, and selected illustrative health care data findings will be provided that facilitate the use of the RUCA taxonomy. In addition, the paper will introduce two tools that can be used in combination with the RUCA taxonomy: 1) travel distance/time to nearest Urbanized Area and
2) Population of Urbanized Areas and Urban Clusters.
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