It was heartening to see some sixty citizens at the September 23 meeting on the latest study of Bangor’s public transit system. The study, by Stantec Consulting Services, an international firm based in Edmonton, Alberta, took a comprehensive look at the Community Connector bus system and how it can best serve the greater Bangor area. The meeting took place at City Hall, and ended after the bus service closed down for the evening.

Though the majority of us were there to show support for expanded bus service, it was disheartening to hear a few old and discredited attitudes persist this late into the discussion.

Bangor’s Pickering Square is the hub of a wheel that radiates major streets outward into Bangor and the surrounding towns. It is the natural and most logical location for the center of the bus system. There is no better use for this downtown space. The buses are visible, accessible and dependable. The hub of the system needs to be at the hub of the city, and talk of moving it should be over.

So should unrealistic expectations of cost-effectiveness. No transportation system pays for itself. This is true of private cars as well buses and trains. Taxpayers don’t demand a per-user accounting of the costs of roads, parking lots, left-turn pockets, enforcement of traffic laws, and the host of other expenses associated with the American car culture. Public transportation is a public service, akin to libraries, schools, police and fire departments. It benefits users and non-users alike. It makes a community better.

Evening hours are an absolute necessity. We’ve been talking about this since at least 2007, when I began riding the bus. In that time, two parking garages have gone up, both of them smack dab along bus routes. This encourages driving and discourages use of the bus, at a time when public policy should be leaning hard in the opposite direction.

The Community Connector has been slowly losing passengers. Anecdotally, it’s easy to see why. I’ve lost count of how many people have told me that they don’t ride the bus to work in the morning because they can’t get home in the evening. Portland’s bus system, which does have evening hours, is thriving.

It is an incontrovertible fact that every dollar spent on public transportation injects four dollars into the economy. When people can get to their jobs without a vehicle, they have more money to spend at local businesses. Less parking is required, freeing funds to be used for more essential services. Traffic congestion eases, creating more time and less stress for everyone.

 So why does it take a year to put up a parking garage, and more than a decade and counting to get evening bus hours? As one citizen at the meeting pointed out, a study is just words and graphs on paper until it is put into action. At what point do we stop funding studies and start investing in actual on-the-ground improvements?

I’m a believer in incremental rather than revolutionary change. I understand that municipalities must be fiscally responsible. But the need for evening bus hours is obvious and overdue. If the city of Bangor can spend $100,000 on a study, it can find the money to expand the hours of service, sooner rather than later. Even extending service by two hours would make a huge difference. People could run errands after work and still take the bus home. Passengers arriving by Concord Coach at six in the evening would no longer be hung out to dry on outer Union Street. Businesses all along the route would benefit.

But some business owners still see the bus system as a nuisance. One man at the meeting complained that the bus stop in front of his business was frequently littered with empty coffee cups and discarded cigarette butts. I don’t like littering, at bus stops or anywhere else, but it’s unfair to blame the bus for people’s bad habits. And he failed to note that the bus also delivers potential customers to his business every half hour during each weekday, with no additional demand for parking.

Attitudes are slow to change. But change they must. Twentieth-century traffic policies that encouraged driving and near-universal car ownership will no longer work in an era of finite fossil fuels, environmental awareness, and inefficient sprawl. Small cities like Bangor can lead the way forward, by investing in real improvements to public transportation now, before the public loses patience with more studies and meetings. Extending bus hours into the evening is a good place to start.

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