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Toward New Horizons - Transportation
2007-11-04
Transportation has long played an important role in the economic development of the Northern Great Plains. Indeed, transportation connections were a key element in the settlement of the Region. Natural transportation assets like the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, the Great Lakes, and Hudson Bay carried many of the first settlers to the NGP region and moved furs, minerals, and agricultural products to market. Later, construction of the railroads across North America enhanced the Region’s connectivity and market access, aiding the growth of the agricultural sector in particular.
Today, the Northern Great Plains’ transportation system remains a significant factor in the Region’s economic development and quality of life. It supports a wide range of commercial activity from manufacturing and mining to agricultural production and food processing to tourism and various service industries. In addition, the citizens of the Region have come to depend upon the transportation system to connect with work, retail establishments, educational facilities, recreational opportunities, and vital services such as health care.
Although an extensive and relatively advanced transportation network has evolved in the Northern Great Plains over the years, the Region has numerous transportation challenges.
These include issues such as rail line abandonment, the continued evolution of the grain handling and storage network, and rail service concerns. The Region also faces needs for better intermodal service, additional intermodal facilities, better access to air service in many communities, better connectivity to and from rural and remote areas, and solutions to increasing congestion in growing urban areas.
Furthermore, the NGP region is struggling with how best to maintain a vast public infrastructure with transportation needs that are growing faster than revenues needed to address them. Planners simply cannot address every need nor support the same level of service on the entire system, especially in sparsely populated portions of the Region. In addition, the threat of terrorism now confronts all transportation stakeholders, challenging both the public and private sectors to reexamine security and vulnerability issues in the transportation system and across entire supply chains.
Another important concern for the Northern Great Plains—one that has in part prompted this study—is the compatibility between present transportation infrastructure and services and current and emerging economic and trade needs of the Region. As the economy of the Northern Great Plains has grown and matured in recent years, there have been questions about the adequacy of the transportation system to move new products and meet new economic needs.
