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Visionary group in Montana tells us their rural transit success story

This group we visited with last week in Montana, Opportunity Link, received a welcome shot in the arm, announced just this morning: they received a $1.5 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development as part of the 2011 Sustainable Communities regional planning grant program. 468 applications requesting more than $500 million in funding were received by HUD, and only 56 communities and regions were selected for the grants.

If you ever doubt the need for public transit in rural areas, or need reaffirmation of the resilience and ingenuity of frontier America, make a trip to Havre, Montana (or second best, watch the short video below.) We had a chance to make that trip this week and, man, was it inspiring.

A group of us from T4America and the American Public Health Association traveled to Montana to meet with people working in health, transportation and local government in the state’s small cities and rural areas. They are vitally interested in the federal transportation bill because in many cases it literally could determine whether these places live, thrive or die.

One of those places is Havre, Montana, a town of about 10,000 roughly 30 miles from the Canadian border, nestled between two Native American reservations, Fort Belknap and Rocky Boy’s. There we met Barbara Stiffarm, the executive director of a scrappy organization called Opportunity Link. The aptly named group’s mission is to connect people in the isolated communities of north central Montana to jobs, job training, affordable housing, medical care and other services that help residents of small towns and reservations “achieve independence, prosperity and a better way of life.”

“We quickly discovered that we can’t do any of that without transportation service,” Stiffarm told us. Working with numerous local communities and the reservations, Opportunity Link has cobbled together federal resources, private grants and scant local funds to connect several different transportation services into an integrated network. To fill gaps in service, Opportunity Link two years ago led the creation of North Central Montana Transit.

NCMT is miraculous for a number of reasons.

First, it offers fixed-route service. Many rural transit services are “on demand” – covering the vast distances separating communities from employment, education and health care centers.

“Every day we cover an area about the size of the state Maryland,” said Jim Lyons, the director of NCMT. They started the service with modest expectations for ridership, but have been blown away by the unmet demand they discovered. Rather than riders in the low hundreds per month, they are instead into the thousands; one in ten is an elderly person who simply could not get to health care, activities and other services without it.

IMG_4340 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

The Dean of Montana State University-Northern shows off some of the seeds used to make the biodiesel for the NCMT buses during last week’s tour in Montana. They hope to use these seeds to help refuel trains passing through Havre from Seattle to Minneapolis.

Second, they also discovered they were being eaten alive by fuel costs, and they were disturbed by the effect that burning all that fuel had on their desire to be a “green” operation.

That led to an exciting research and development project with Montana State University-Northern to grow their own biodiesel fuel. The idea is to get local wheat growers to rotate in crops of an oil-seed plant known as camelina. A recent break-through in the local research effort has raised hopes that camelina, which has the advantage of being an extremely hardy, non-food crop, can produce biodiesel that can fuel buses as well as the freight trains that use Havre as a refueling stop between Seattle and Minneapolis. More exciting still, a by-product of that process could also be a component in jet fuel.

And all because an ingenious local group set out to connect people to opportunities through rural transit!

As inspiring as it was, an eye-opening aspect of our trip was to see just how vulnerable these communities are, and how large a role the federal transportation bill plays in their operation.

The local leaders and service providers we met in Montana are mindful that changes to programs being considered in Congress could strengthen such services, and lead to greater coordination and efficiencies, or throttle them altogether. As one tangible example, the HUD Sustainable Communities program that awarded Opportunity Link the $1.5 million grant today was axed last week in the budget for 2012. They also are deeply concerned that changes to programs such as transportation enhancements, now being considered in the Senate’s MAP-21 version of the bill, could leave them no way to fund the community projects that have been vital to economic development and safety.

Further changes would reduce the input that these communities have into how the state sets transportation priorities and allocates funding. The level of alarm was high, and it served to strengthen our commitment as a coalition to continue to emphasize the needs of rural and frontier America and push for measures that will help them, as the bill makes its way through the House and Senate.

Transit advocates in Oregon and Montana take to the op-ed pages

A pair of op-ed pieces published in the past week illustrate a clamoring for action on a transportation bill that invests in the future and expands travel options for all Americans – and a resistance to the deep cuts some are championing in Washington.

The head of a development firm specializing in green building and a key Northwest labor leader took to the op-ed pages of the Oregonian. In “Getting the best bang for our transportation buck,” Gerding Edlen Development Inc. CEO Mark Edlen and Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamberlain made the case for robust transit investment, and pointed to Portland as an example. “Not only does transit create jobs directly for workers such as bus drivers, but it also creates manufacturing jobs,” they wrote, adding:

Oregon Iron Works manufactures streetcars in Clackamas. Businesses like that are poised to grow, add jobs and better support the region’s economy if the country chooses to make more substantial investments in 21st-century transportation.

Edlen and Chamberlain also pointed out that planning and building more wisely through reformed and forward-looking transportation policy creates jobs today and a lays the foundation for a stronger economy in the decades to come.

Smart land-use planning and investments in affordable options like streetcar, light rail and bike networks make it easier to drive less here, and we do, about 20 percent less than Americans in other large cities. These household savings mean an extra $800 million circulating in our economy because spending less on imported cars and fuel means more money in local pockets to spend on local business.

In another part of the west, Missoula City Coucilmember Dave Strohmaier penned an op-ed on restoring Amtrak service in southern Montana. The piece was published in several of state’s newspapers, including the Billings Gazette.

Strohmaier said passenger rail will be an essential component of a 21st century transportation system and urged Montana to lead.

For too long, Montanans have underestimated our ability to change national transportation policy. Sure, there have been those unflagging passenger rail advocates who have continued doing the good work of keeping this issue alive for the past three decades, but until now we’ve lacked both the political will at all levels of government and a coordinated effort to make passenger rail through southern Montana a reality.

Strohmaier has no quibble with high-speed rail, but he does insist that decision-makers in both Helena and Washington remember the diverse and dispersed benefits that all forms of passenger rail provide. Montana currently receives service from Amtrak’s Empire Builder, but many residents live at great distance from the line and would benefit from additional service. “High speed rail certainly has its place in our national rail infrastructure network,” he wrote, but these projects “should not overshadow the importance of knitting together the rest of the nation — particularly rural America and the American West.”

With funding for public transportation in jeopardy, voices like these from outside of Washington are a needed boost for transit and an important reminder of the options the American say they want.

Smarter transportation case study #1: Yellowstone LINX Cooperative

The LINX program has integrated transportation providers in 27 counties for an easy-to-use and more seamless network for riders.

LINX is a member cooperative that connects transportation providers across 27 rural counties in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. LINX uses innovative technologies to market services efficiently via one integrated system. The Yellowstone Business Partnership, or YBP, led the charge for LINX, which was incorporated in January 2010.

Within the Greater Yellowstone region, there had been significant gaps in service and coordination between transportation providers and a general lack of knowledge about available service. Improving the marketing of existing services through a new website is central to the LINX project. This central ticketing and trip planning website allows riders to book and confirm online trips anywhere in the region, as well as print tickets at home.

YBP is also testing a system called “LINX-Comm” that would allow vehicles to communicate directly with the central server about location, availability and scheduling. The LINXComm system includes online ticketing and remote printing, onboard ticket validation, GPS location information for vehicles and Wi-Fi service for riders of participating Linx providers.

The pilot phase for LINX, which began in January, is now testing and developing the following mobility management components:

Trip planning and ticketing system with multiple customer touchpoints.
Improved marketing of existing and emerging services.
Coordination of route schedules and transfer points.
A centralized location for information on all modes of mobility

Facilitating convenient and affordable transportation in the Greater Yellowstone area will bolster economic viability, as well as reduce traffic congestion and carbon emissions, while helping preserve what is special about the community’s ecosystem. With more than 3 million visitors each year, the region needs to offer viable alternatives to driving a private vehicle. The LINX program has made great strides toward filling that need.

For More Information: Yellowstone Business Partnership

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Editor’s Note: Our new report on smarter mobility demonstrates how existing and emerging technologies can squeeze more capacity from over-burdened highways, help commuters avoid traffic delays and expand and improve transportation options, all while saving money and creating jobs. Many of these smart transportation solutions are already fueling innovation throughout the country, through both the public and private sector. These 14 case studies from around the U.S. and the world demonstrate the community benefits smart mobility solutions are giving regions, cities, and businesses.

Read the ITS Case Study Series