A surprising fact to many folks is that I live in Moorhead, Minnesota. It’s a surprise, being that everything I ever do is about improving outcomes in North Dakota and I speak about our legislators or lawmakers as though I continue to live there.
I still do, in my heart.
I find myself on the MN side of things because to me Fargo-Moorhead is just one big city and I didn’t get to decide that the river split the states, but here we are. And more than 30 years of my life was as a North Dakotan. I was born there, and I plan to die there, and no matter where I live, it’s my state and my home.
But a few months ago, the MN Department of Public Safety sent me a reminder that I needed to renew my state ID. And a week ago, I started to plan my journey to do so.
I’m a non-driver because of a general fear of being in cars from a terrible accident in my youth. As a life long bus taker, with an appreciation for public transit, I figured I’d be going to the place I went to years ago to renew my ID.
So, I’d be taking, Bus Route 4. Something offered by Fargo-Moorhead’s metro transit service Matbus and I’d be going somewhere vaguely northeast of the court house in Moorhead. It was pretty out of the way, but ultimately just a minor hassle.
Except, it wasn’t there anymore.
Apparently, across four years it had moved to City Hall, before we bulldozed everything there, and it was cast out to practically the country. If you know the area, it’s about 10 blocks north of Aldi or half a mile east of Centennial Park. By bus, the closest you can get is Walmart, but the Matbus website told me that every Monday Lake and Prairies Community Action Partners does a shuttle service.
I thought, okay, sure. So, I waited until the next Monday and set off from the Shire.
Oops, Missed My Transfer.
If you live in the southern bits of Moorhead, you have quite a few different choices for getting to the Walmart nearest the DMV.
It’s an interesting sort of Chutes and Ladders game that plays out more like a series of strategic choices to walk or wait. One could take Bus 2 from south Moorhead, drop off downtown Moorhead, and then walk north a bit to catch Bus 4 on the way to your destination.
Or one could find their way to Bus 3, make a strategic stop somewhere in east Moorhead, and catch Bus 4. A less intensive route is taking Bus 2 back to the Bus Station and then getting on Bus 4. They’re all about the same choice, and as a pro gamer, navigating this was only mildly difficult. I kid.
And so, around 8:00 AM I found myself on Bus 2. We hit a traffic jam at the Downtown Fargo Roundabout, probably from construction, and after hitting every red light, pulled into a spot near the old downtown engagement center because the former GMC bus station was likely to collapse any day and we no longer had a real bus station. (It probably won’t actually collapse, but it’s more fun to imagine that. And this is our third big move after we said it wasn’t safe to use our public transit building.)
So, the downtown engagement center that was helping those who experienced homelessness, which was a police station before that, is now the bus station, and if you need to pee, you can, but you have to be buzzed in. If this all sounds confusing or frustrating, yes. (Post Publish Edit - I’m told you don’t need to be buzzed in anymore!)
The current building isn’t really designed for public transit, just like that space and those roads aren’t either, but with enough city construction projects happening, nothing makes sense, and it certainly blends in at the moment.
Not that much of that mattered as my Bus 2 came to a stop, while Bus 1 and 4 came to a start. I walked off my bus to see my ride leaving, and with it absolute certainly I was just gifted half an hour to wonder downtown and wait for the next bus. If you have an appointment anywhere, you’re best leaving 30 minutes earlier these days, which means spending nearly an hour to get to about anywhere in the city or back.
This extra time I was gifted allowed me to saunter through our city hall and public library area, with a good dozen folks sleeping under trees and building awnings.
Funny thing is these folks once slept fifty feet from our homeless services, which got displaced to nearly two miles west of downtown for both legitimate reasons and an emotional belief that homeless folks would leave downtown if you diverted services to a place that’s pretty terrible to get to by bus or foot. Reminds us of a woman misunderstanding a deer crossing sign over a decade ago. But the underlying reality was an assumption businesses could only succeed if homelessness was invisible.
So the new building is about as middle of nowhere as you can get inside the middle of a city, and the journey there means more time decent folks don’t have to see human costs of the inequities built into our system. What it didn’t do was stop those experiencing homelessness from sleeping downtown, because we don’t have enough beds for all of them and we don’t seem to be paying for more. Something advocates said time and time again was the case. Though the move did connect a lot of meaningful services so it wasn’t for nothing.
Anyways, being powerless to stop the horrific inequities, I did admire the beautiful design of the pathing we had next to the library and, given my time to explore, I looked up at our babies’ first skyscraper, erected when Burgum still believed in Fargo or at least lived here. (Don’t I count that building off of Island Park? No. Why not? Can’t say.)
And what I really found during my sauntering through downtown is a city that looked at the parking lots around 2010 and asked if up was a good direction to go. And we certainly did. Picture above is a place I used to live with my Dad when I was a tot. I’m under the impression no apartments exist there now and haven’t for a while, but back in the day you could get double orange soda from the vending machine, and that was something. I used to enjoy the night lights and sound of the train at 3:00 AM.
Funny thing about North Dakota is that a lot of political players today have a story of how important their parents were to state healthcare or politics. Not a lot of folks with stories involving cheap orange soda being the best highlight you could remember or walking downtown as a child and seeing the life and magic of a city we’re being told to be afraid of today. But walking these streets doesn’t feel any different now for people with nothing to lose. And our city is beautiful, if not for the fear and hate in people’s hearts.
But back to Bus 4, arriving ten minutes early, I was let on and able to sit in the cool shade until departure. The trip was uneventful, and I got off at the Walmart stop in Dilworth, right after asking my bus driver if he knew where the shuttle would be for the DMV.
He said no. I said okay.
I found there was actually a pathway from Aldi’s to almost the DMV, pictured at the very top of this article. It was a pretty neat path and if not for the Mario-style-sun-set-to-kill, would’ve been a rather pleasant journey.
The DMV, itself, was beautiful. I did my business in less than twenty minutes, and they had the forms ready to go. I asked them if they knew where the shuttle existed, and they said no. A 15-minute walk got me back to the bus stop, and 20 minutes later I was getting off to walk home.
All said and done, I spent 60 minutes walking at a very brisk pace. I’m gay and drink coffee—so others might expect more like an hour and a half. But this leads to our next question.
What If You’re Not an Able-Bodied Adult?
I was pretty unsure of how I’d get to the DMV when I started this journey. The picture above represents the closest you can get to the Moorhead DMV by bus. It’s Google Maps, but I have significantly transformed it into a clear artwork of my own. And I’m reporting for educational reasons.
Anyways, I had to walk about 40 minutes to and from, and those sidewalks don’t look like a high-priority shoveling item come winter. You, luckily, can find a host of information on the Matbus page, specifically for Route 4. Below is even the timetable as listed on the website.
Well, problem solved. The DMV is right there on that timetable. You’d think. If you were foolish. That is only there to trick you! To be fair and balanced, if you read the top of the page, you’d get clear instructions for getting to the Clay County DMV.
So, we’ll go ahead and click on that link. This gives us 5 services to consider in lieu of public transportation getting you to the DMV of your city. Why would someone who can’t legally drive ever need such a thing to get to the place where you get a driver’s license? A real catch 22 that one.
CAPLP - Service to Clay County DMV & Withdrawal Management/Detox Facility
Handi-Wheels
Metro Senior Ride
FirstLink 2-1-1
FM Ride Source Brochure
We’ll start with Metro Senior Ride, which does work. Spoilers for the others.
It costs 3 dollars to and back from a place and is for folks over 60 who are able-bodied. Very pointedly, it’s for generally active older adults who just don’t have transportation. There are no lifts or ramps, and they answer their phone promptly if anyone has questions. Things might change, so always confirm with them first for anything, but you’d need to contact them anyways to get service.
Handi-Wheels does not service Moorhead, so that’s right out. I had originally thought this entire page was for the Moorhead DMV, but later realized it was all their transportation partners. And fear not, somewhere is something about not being responsible for information on the page. If you were worried about that.
That brings us to “CAPLP - Service to Clay County DMV & Withdrawal Management/Detox Facility.” Which is no longer in service. Not that you’d know looking at the Matbus page. And if pages could collect dust, I imagine I’m that pages only visitor this year.
Reaching out to CAPLP asking about it, I was given forms for the CAPLP Rural Routes for seniors. They, to my knowledge, were not aware that information was even on the Matbus page before I reached out. At first, the folks I talked to had no idea what I was talking about, but later I found that underutilization led to it being discontinued.
I’m not surprised, given the time window of one day a week, and them even offering it for a while is a testament to their dedication and understanding of the need for services. They are not the bad guys because this isn’t offered anymore, they are a good organization, but they couldn’t solve this gap by themselves.
I did reach out to Matbus and have not yet heard back from them, but their page is dusty, and I imagine most of them are struggling to survive the chaos. I’ll get to this later, but I’m always giving Matbus 5 stars. The folks working there carry this city on their backs, and the issues I find are with city management, not the folks serving Matbus. And to be honest, probably a whole lot of folks who never take public transit making decisions about it.
Still, it is a fortunate thing that when I showed up to that parking lot, I was capable of making a nearly two mile round trip. Other folks may not have been so lucky.
Finally, we’ll talk about both FirstLink and FM Ride Source 2026. FirstLink answers our 211 Helpline, which you can call as your easy answer to anything across North Dakota and our area of western Minnesota. They have a searchable directory of various resources and can offer some information about a lot of things.
What’s better for our purposes is the FM Ride Source 2026, as that actually just answers every question we might have about our particular question of how a less than able-bodied person might make it to Mordor.
If you’d like to find where the resources are listed, it’s FMRIDESOURCE.com. And you can even type that into a search bar. And if you do, you find yourself actually at https://fargond.gov/live/transportation/fm-ride-source, because there is no FMRIDESOURCE.com to my knowledge.
What? I don’t understand. I tried the WayBackMachine to find if it existed as a website at some point and I really couldn’t find it. I was curious just what organization managed it. I still don’t know.
I did email and leave a message with Matbus to ask who put it together, because it’s legit a very good resource. It’s the only thing that seems to matter on that page, and it’s on the bottom. Dang it. No shuttle services either, I had to manually scroll down. I kid. I’m easing the tension, because I want you to be relaxed when we explain—
Why This Matters
The DMV is an essential place for people to get their ID, Passport, and/or Driver’s License. I will admit that the majority of people can likely get a ride to the place. And if someone is looking to get tested for driving, they would need a vehicle. There are services for elders or people with disability. And there is even taxi services or Lyft or Uber.
Otherwise, able-bodied and active adults like myself don’t have a particular challenge getting there in the summer, even if it’s a nearly 3 hour round trip.
For the services above, some of them have coverage, most of them have cost, and they all pose an extra burden on people attempting to get things they might legally need. Especially if our elections become such that they need a higher form of ID.
As a lifelong bus rider, I love the work Matbus does. I would give them five stars. I assume every problem I’ve ever had is because they’re not getting the funding they need from the cities. And Fargo had a bad fall, with nearly a million dollars lost from federal funding due to too large of city size.
It’s the metro version of making too much money for free insurance and too little money to afford the market place. The sweet spot of economic despair at scale.
Also the metro transit has always been a big topic of discussion, and to my knowledge, we find dwindling ridership, cut routes, and the nightmare that has come from the structural issues that eliminated the bus station as a bus stop. I have not once make public comment, because what could I say? Would it matter? We have open comment periods that are poorly attended because the people really struggling have better things to do than convince uninterested bureaucrats their life is hard. If they are interested bureaucrats, I haven’t yet been convinced. And I’m pretty sure it’s a money issue anyways where our hearts and wallets aren’t in synch.
Unfortunately, the bus service as it exists now is frustrating, unreliable, and inconsistent, where both residents and employers take notice.
To put it another way, saying you take the bus during a job interview is a great way to not get a job. And our skeleton services mean the bus is the last resort for anyone, rather than simply another option of transport.
A person with a working car and a license would probably never take our bus, and it doesn’t have to be like that. It should be a realistic and heavily utilized service for people going to concerts or places without a lot of great parking, where they don’t need to worry about their car.
It should be a thing where you could go with a friend to the mall and neither of you have to worry about driving or mall parking and can just chat the entire time. The bus can be an amazing asset, something people WANT to take, if we invest in it as such rather than looking at it like an annoying requirement or an afterthought.
I just attended, virtually, the Health Beyond Healthcare initiative workshop. It featured several panels on continuum of care, patient service, youth mental health, and system work. Of the over half a dozen panels, half of them had speakers talking about people without a license due to DUI or other issues, where transport was a significant barrier for them.
For me, the DMV in Clay County was a great experience and rather seamless, but I wasn’t a complicated customer. I generally love the work our Community Action Partners do, including our friends at the Lake and Prairie iteration. And I will assume the DMV moved because that was the best place Moorhead could find.
This isn’t an article about why these places are bad at all. These are good places, with good people working at them. But there is something missing in our system. There is some communication error happening. And I keep seeing our public transit getting less funded, with less coverage, and it feels like it’s an afterthought of city planning rather than built bottom-up.
And this entire article isn’t this massive call to fix this particular issue with getting to the Moorhead DMV. It is a consideration for the people who don’t drive, when we’ve made our entire system so dependent on cars—that cost…a ton of money. That not…everyone has. That not…everyone can use. And a laundry list of various options, existing like a barrage of tiny and specific nets underneath a crumbling foundation, isn’t to me an inspiring answer for now or the future.
We need a strong vision for a public transit system that our city leaders would take on their way to work. Because trust me, it wasn’t just the foundation below the bus stop that’s unsound.
A public transit system that we’re all proud of is a service that creates value. Yes, the cost shows up on a spreadsheet, but the life one brings to our city, to our workforce, and to the agency of all the people who live here will make your money back and then some.
Choose One Action
Take a Bus Trip in your city (Fargo/Moorhead is here) and share the experience on social media
Share this Substack, as most folks don’t even know what it’s like to take the bus these days
Pay attention to city hall as they talk about public transport - I will highlight any story I see.
You could also email your city hall representative or mayor, but I’m not sure how much they can do.