Sixteen of Montana's 52 rural hospitals screen at risk of closing, the median drive to deliver a baby is 60 minutes, and 71,975 locations still lacked adequate broadband when Montana's BEAD plan was approved.
How to read this page: the class chip on every measure is the honesty label. Counted = an inspection or enumeration record. Modeled = a study's projection or risk score — printed with the modeler's name. Assessed = a structured survey of required investment — needs as documented, not measurements of decay. Figures keep the form their source gave them; years are printed on every measure.
Click any category to expand it — every measure with its figure, what it means in plain language, and its source.
Every measure carries its value, class, geography, year, definition, context and source. Montana's profile is a rural-distance profile: its congestion is low and its bridge condition is middling, while its sharpest needs are all functions of scale — a 52-hospital rural fleet, 3,001 dams, 71,975 unconnected locations and a 60-minute median drive to deliver a baby.
Three honesty notes are printed rather than smoothed over. Hospitals: Montana's zero full rural closures since 2015 is printed alongside the one Rural Emergency Hospital conversion that ended inpatient care — the fleet is eroding by service cuts (above all maternity), not by padlocked doors, and the measures keep both facts visible. Broadband: the August 2025 plan-of-record count (71,975 locations) is printed as the measure, with NTIA's November 2025 approval wording ('over 68,000') disclosed in the category's fine print. Dams: current NID aggregations differ slightly on Montana's high-hazard count (204 in the set printed; 214 in another) — one consistent set is printed and the variance disclosed, never blended.
Food is printed as Feeding America's Montana partner publishes it — '1 in 8' overall, '1 in 6' children — with the percentages shown as direct conversions of those published ratios, labelled as such. Power prints no invented grid dollar need: neither ASCE nor EIA publishes a Montana-only figure, so the category carries the exposure shares (coal 42%, hydro 38% of 2022 generation) and says so in its fine print. Traffic carries a single statewide Reason Foundation measure, because TTI publishes no Montana metro.