I’m often the last person to get off the last bus back to Bangor from Orono. The route terminates at Pickering Square, but the drivers will let me ride with them up Union Street on their way to the garage to retire the bus for night. When they let me off, the front of the bus reads “Not in Service.” It’s seven o’clock in the evening.
The bus is only running this late because the Veazie-Orono-Old Town route (VOOT, for short) is a nearly two-hour loop that began at 5:15. It’s the last bus back to the station. From now until 6:15 in the morning, Bangor will be a city of 32,000 without public transportation.
The last Community Connector buses of the day for anywhere leave Pickering Square at 5:45, and they don’t return. This is too early to meet passengers from the 6 pm buses arriving from Portland and Boston at the Concord Coach depot. It’s too early to grab a bite to eat downtown after work. It’s too early to attend a city council meeting, or a play, or a music performance.
Public transportation is much on the public mind in the greater Bangor area these days, as the community charts its 21st-century course. We’ve had yet another study, and just recently, a new grant to build a central bus terminal. Pickering Square is being reconfigured. So are the bus routes and bus stops. Big changes are coming.
But we’re still at least two years away from extended hours. It’s what everybody wants, and we’ve been talking about it for a long time. I’ve been a regular bus rider since 2006, and it was what everybody wanted back then. Successful city council candidacies have been centered on the issue. And still we wait.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m an incrementalist by temperament; I understand that things are often more complicated than they seem. Later hours mean more service time for the buses, leading to more maintenance time and the need for newer and more reliable buses. More drivers will need to be brought on full-time and paid decently. Costs will rise up and down the system.
But that’s all it is, really: a question of money. Would the city rather spend public money on more parking, or on a more effective public transportation system that will reduce the need for parking? Maybe it’s case of picking the low-hanging fruit first. Designated stops are all well and good, and I guess it would be nice to locate your bus on your cell phone in real time, but it’s frustrating that these lesser issues have leapfrogged the obvious and longstanding need for later hours.
My message to the Bangor city council and the governing boards of the other participating towns (Brewer, Hampden, Orono, Veazie and Old Town): Find the money. Extend service by two hours, across the system. This would mean that the last buses leave Pickering Square at 7:45, instead of 5:45, as they do now. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.
But it has to be done system-wide, and for the long term. No more “pilot projects” dangling on the edge of cancellation if they don’t produce immediate results. You can’t cherry-pick routes, because many people rely on more than one of them to get home. If ridership ticks upward – and it will – bump the whole schedule up another two hours. That would keep buses running until almost 10 pm. People could go out at night without their cars. Working late would no longer mean missing the last bus home.
It’s an investment that will pay for itself in the community within a short number of years. People not driving out of habit have more money to spend elsewhere in the economy. They will spend much of that money at local businesses. Everybody wins, even people who don’t go near a bus.
Public transportation is the future. And as Slower Traffic enters a new decade, it’s gratifying to see other, younger writers taking up the cause. We are living in the Late Automobile Age. It’s time for something better.
But wheels turn slowly. The Community Connector does not have the infrastructure to extend the hours immediately. Plans and preparations must be put in place before the first late buses roll. I’m told this is a two-year process. We’ve been talking about extended hours for ten times that long. Now is the time to commit.
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