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The number of transit operators in Minot has decreased from three to two. Effective January 1st, Souris Basin Transportation, the oft-forgotten rural transit service in the Minot region, will absorb the call-ahead transit service presently provided by the Minot Commission on Aging.  SBT will still operate alongside the (woefully inadequate) fixed-route services of Minot City Transit.

Despite the rearrangement, there’s no planned expansion of service at either transit operation.  I said it years ago and I’ll say it again: the hours transit operates in Minot are impossible for commuting workers to use, and the city has grown outside of its old bus routes.

According to Governor Schaefer, who’s back in Bismarck representing the USDA, the federal Rural Utilities Service will be making changes to its loan programs to facilitate increased broadband access in North Dakota.

This is welcome news after our state came in 48th in the nation for internet speed.  I can’t wait for my very own gigabit fibre connection!

You can now drive from Williston to Grand Forks and back again without ever wincing at oncoming traffic. The last bit of the four-lane US 2 project has opened up, leaving just 20 km between Montana and Williston as a 2-lane road.

The next project that needs attention is US 52, from Jamestown through to Portal (Saskatchewan will carry it all the way to Moose Jaw).  And I certainly wouldn’t mind a new highway providing a direct route from Minot to Winnipeg…

I got my text message about half an hour after the story broke. Barack has made his pick for VP. It’s Joe Biden.

If Biden is supposed to be a strong pick, then it is solely on his foreign policy credentials, because Biden is everything the Obama campaign wasn’t: old and stuck solidly inside the Beltway.  And frankly, I was expecting a woman.

There are worse people.   Biden’s still got his charms, and he can speak like a Senator.  But with Barack at the top, I was hoping for more.

Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens was in Fargo yesterday, stirring up support for a domestic energy plan to reduce dependence on foreign oil.  Under the plan, natural gas would be used to replace gasoline, and wind power would replace the electric power produced by electric plants that burn natural gas.

Pickens also advocates emergency measures to allow the construction of power lines between major cites and the windy regions of the Midwest — presently transmission line construction can be easily blocked by individual landholders.

In my view, the plan would work, but using natural gas as an automotive fuel is impractical at this juncture — it would require expensive new equipment at lots of fuelling stations before people could even feasibly use natural-gas powered cars.  Furthermore, the Pickens Plan just glosses over the fact that natural gas is also nonrenewable, and will itself have to be replaced.

While the wind energy aspect of this plan is phenomenal and exactly the direction the country needs to go, running cars on natural gas is not something that can happen in a timeframe faster than developing reliable electric cars.  Better just to go electric now.

Senator Mathern’s campaign has called for 10 gigawatts of installed wind power by the year 2020.  For perspective, that would provide the same amount of power as about twenty new coal-fired power plants.

It’s a much more ambitious and useful goal to have than the mere 1.5 GW by 2020 the present administration has set.  So far, North Dakota only produces 0.345 GW from wind, a paltry amount considering the potential our state has.

UND and NDSU have failed to step up and join a growing number of prestigious universities coming out for setting the drinking age back to 18.  Instead of tackling the real problem head on, it seems they are content to allow the status quo of secret keg parties and forbidden-fruit binge drinking to continue on campus.  UND even maintains the laughable pretense of being a “dry” campus.

It’s plain to see that the 21 drinking age is a failed experiment of the 1980s. It’s high time that we started treating adults like adults.

The Missouri River has been operated on the same management plan for more than 60 years.  Though upstream legislators are calling for a new study, Missouri’s water managers get defensive and hostile any time the present system is questioned.

A new study will reveal just what the balance of interests needs to be.  And we have to do it, because without a new plan that takes into account everything that has changed since 1944, North Dakota is going to be left dry.

In July, $2.6 million was paid to North Dakotans for their participation in the Farmer’s Union Carbon Credit Program.  Farmers participate by using techniques like no-till farming to keep carbon in the ground, while livestock producers capture methane from manure to prevent it from entering the atmosphere.  This allows them to sell carbon credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange, where getting rid of ton of CO₂ is worth $3.80.

North Dakota’s in the slow lane of the Information Superhighway.  According to a recent report from the Communication Workers of America, North Dakota ranks 48th in average internet connection speed.

Now, Qwest may be using this story as an excuse to beg for more federal incentives to expand rural access, but its service area is already just the major cities — same with the cable companies, though they’re a bit more widespread.

The real need for help is with North Dakota’s RTCs.  While they have done a stellar job implementing DSL service nearly everywhere, it’s pretty clear that the next step is fiber-to-the-home, and that will require a massive rewiring of their mostly rural networks.