Hitting the pocketbook from all sides

Fuel Costs Hit Montana’s Major Markets: What’s Next?

Transportation issues are bearing down on the economy of Montana. How is this affecting our farmers, industries and how we view our future strategies, policies and approaches?

The Burton K. Wheeler Center, at the Montana State University, hosted a conference on transportation in Billings last week, with the goal to discuss with leaders and legislators how this increase in fuel has forced a shift in our economy and how are we to approach the future.

Representatives from three of Montana’s major industries — tourism, farming and food distribution — discussed how Montana’s markets are being significantly affected by fuel costs.

Where will the future take us?

Montana’s Transportation Challenges the Focus of Wheeler Center Forum

As transportation becomes a looming question affecting Montana’s economic future with its large and rural expanse, the Burton K. Wheeler Center is hosting a timely discourse on this critical issue.

“This industry of transportation has opportunities and challenges, such as additional train service across the state and the future of air service in Eastern Montana,” said Julie Hitchcock, Associate Director for the Wheeler Center. What service will continue and new developments may happen in our rural and urban areas?

The Wheeler Center is the state’s oldest public policy forum, and is host to the upcoming conference “The High Cost of Fuel: What’s Down the Road for Montanans?” with efforts to create a non-partisan dialogue based around statewide difficult topics, on October 1st and 2nd in Billings, Montana.

Smart Growth America Wants to Ask...

Whither Will the Highway Dollars Go?

A Washington, D.C. group wants help from U.S. Sen. Max Baucus to transform the U.S. Department of Transportation from a pork barrel into a focused agency with a mission.

"We're funding bridges-to-nowhere while bridges in Minneapolis are collapsing," said Smart Growth America president Geoffrey Anderson, whose organization is part of a $4 million campaign called Transportation for America. The money goes toward grass roots organizing, research and lobbying for the group's platform. Click here for a list of partners behind Transportation for America.

Driven Delegate

E-Vehicles On Display at DNC

"I almost fit into this car," says Nate Vanderschaff, folding his 6'5" frame into his Rav4 EV, from Toyota. Pulling away from the curb, the small SUV purrs almost noiselessly, its electric engine emitting nothing into the atmosphere.

A Colorado delegate pledged to Obama, Vanderschaff is here at the DNC not just to cast his vote for the Democratic nominee but to evangelize for electric vehicles. He's putting on the EV Rolling Showcase, a promotional event designed to convince convention-goers that the future of cars is not just hybrid but plug-in.

Ride For Prizes

Freiker Launches Bike-to-School Movement

Seeking a way to encourage his own two boys to bicycle to school, software entrepreneur Rob Nagler three years ago created a system that would record the students' every ride, and award them a series of prizes based on the number of two-wheeled school trips.

Today that system – now powered by an ingenious sensor technology known as the "Freikometer" – is going nationwide, with a sponsorship from the leading U.S. bicycle maker Trek.

Fuel Costs and the New Isolationism

Sheridan - Think of Wyoming as the giant ocean that it once was, with vast stretches of water between islands and atolls. Imagine traveling by boat. The more time and money it costs to reach each island, the more isolated it becomes – unless it has something singular to offer. The plain jane atolls affording nothing but tidal pools and coconuts eventually are ignored all together.

The high cost of fuel, circa 2008, has the same isolating factors on Wyoming as the oceans of yore.

Never mind the irony about how much fuel we produce. Wyoming communities, especially the small ones, depend on cheap oil. Wyoming relies on the outside world for practically everything. The more it costs to deliver those goods, the more they're going to cost the populace.

Ride Rage

Newly Numerous, Cyclists Face Angry Drivers

Abusing cyclists – it's all the rage! I found this out the other day, using one of the mid-block crosswalks that interrupt Canyon Blvd., in Boulder – the kind that have flashing yellow lights to alert motorists that yes, they have to stop for the unprotected person risking life and limb to cross the street in traffic.

"Get off that bike!" a blowsy bottle-blonde in an SUV shouted, so loudly that I stopped, startled, in mid-street. "You're not a pedestrian!"

from the new west blog: energy policy

An Inconvenient Argument:  55 mph

If you want to cause a hostage situation at a truck stop, try telling the drivers on a break that a mandatory 55 miles per hour speed limit is on the table in Congress.

It’s not – yet – but Sen. John Warner of Virginia thinks it should be. Warner has asked Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman to investigate if current car technology would mean better gas efficiency with a lowered speed limit.

The last time a national speed limit was imposed by Congress was in 1974 during an oil crisis which had Americans lining up for what seemed to be a gas shortage. The limit was repealed in 1995. Warner pointed out there are studies showing that two percent of American highway fuel consumption a day was saved, and the speed limit saved thousands of lives.

Warner quoted the Department of Energy’s website data, which says, in part, that if a car is going faster than 60 mph, every five mph over that costs the driver an extra 30 cents a gallon for gas.

The 'Megapolitan' West

Huntsman, Ritter Demand Feds’ Attention

It was surprising to see Govs. Bill Ritter and Jon Huntsman show up yesterday in downtown Denver. Usually it takes a natural disaster or a major fundraising opportunity to get two Western governors, of two separate parties, together in the same room. But Colorado's Ritter and Huntsman, of Utah, showed up at a press briefing at the offices of a big Denver law firm yesterday to mark the debut of … a new policy report.