Author: Hank Garfield

Hopeful

Hank Garfield

This year Spring arrived all at once, over a weekend that rolled Good Friday and Easter, the Kenduskeag Canoe Race, four day games at Fenway Park, and the Boston Marathon all into one four-day package. The Red Sox are playing as I write this, and it’s not even noon. My bicycle has a new chain and fresh air in the tires. The sun is shining. Today is Try Transit Day in Bangor, and the already low fares for the Community Connector buses are halved, in an effort to attract new riders.

I’m having trouble finding the necessary focus to write about all this, so please forgive me if this entry seems to be about a lot of things. I usually write a baseball piece around Opening Day, but I’m sad that the inevitable has finally happened and the designated hitter will now be standard across both leagues. This follows the election of David Ortiz, the greatest DH the pro game has yet seen, into the Hall of Fame. Never mind that he was half a player – if you’re going to have a DH, it might as well be someone with an outsized personality who repeatedly rose to the occasion, and happened to play for your favorite team.

But if pitchers (except Shohei Ohtani) aren’t going to hit anymore, they should at least be allowed to pitch. Someone needs to tell this to Dave Roberts, manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I’ll always love Roberts the player for The Stolen Base Heard ‘Round the World. But Roberts the manager has pulled a rookie from a no-hitter in progress in his first major league start, and earlier this month he removed Clayton Kershaw from a perfect game. Insanity.

Baseball is no longer America’s game. We prefer the belligerence of our brand of football and its obvious military underpinnings. Television buries the World Series at night to accommodate the fall football schedule. The Super Bowl is our big annual sporting event, and it happens in February, the bleakest month of the year.

I’m old enough now to let most of this stuff go. Easter is a time to celebrate, not to whine. Baseball will survive. In the first inning I caught on TV this year, the Red Sox started a six-run rally with a walk, a single, a sacrifice bunt, and a sacrifice fly. Three straight doubles followed, but small ball opened the door. It put a smile on my face when I went to pick up the bicycle from the shop, in preparation for cycling along the course of the Kenduskeag Canoe Race two days later.

This year I had friends in both the canoe race and the Boston Marathon. I’ll never run a marathon, but I’d like to do the canoe race before I run out of “one of these years.” I suppose what I like best about the canoe race is that it’s first time all year I see a bunch of boats on a body of water. My own boat has a mast and two sails, and requires a bit of preparation before it floats in the spring. But the canoe race tells me that it won’t be long.

Maine is the best place to live in the United States. Having lived in several other places, I’m convinced of this. Sure, our winters are long, but they’re not that stressful if you don’t have to drive in them. Spring, summer, and fall are magical. And Maine is mostly filled with friendly, reasonable people who care about their community and quality of life.

Try Transit Day is an example of this, as public transportation slowly bounces back from the pandemic. The skeleton of the new bus terminal is rising in Bangor’s Pickering Square. When it is completed later this year, it will be a centerpiece of the downtown. Everyone who visits Bangor for an event will see it, and will know that Bangor is committed to a future in which public transportation is a fixture, and not something to be “tried.” We did that, fellow Bangorians, and we should be proud.

More challenges lie ahead, as we navigate the Late Automobile Age in our mostly rural corner of the country. But after an Easter weekend filled with buses, bicycles, boats, and baseball, it’s hard not to be just a little hopeful.

Pro-Choice on Transportation

Hank Garfield

Recently I rented a car, and temporarily rejoined the American car culture. I needed to get to Waterville, Augusta, and the Blue Hill peninsula, all within the span of a few days. I picked up the car at Bangor International Airport at noon on Monday with the promise to return it at the same time Friday.

Every time I pull out of a rental car lot, I realize that most of the people I know do this every day. They get in the car and go somewhere. Driving is as much a habit to most Americans – and certainly most Mainers – as my morning coffee is to me. 

But this time around, another thought kept vying for attention, and it was this: “Why do I have to do this by car? Why aren’t there any other options?”

Waterville is 60 highway miles from Bangor, Augusta 20 miles beyond that. Why isn’t there a train? Why is there hardly any bus service at all? (Waterville is served by Greyhound, and Augusta by Concord Coach. Trips are infrequent. It is not possible to travel round-trip between Bangor and Waterville in the same day.)

The Blue Hill peninsula is made up of small towns connected by rural roads that I know intimately. It’s where I grew up, and where I survived my teenage driving adventures (not everyone was so lucky). There was no public transportation then, and there’s precious little now. We lived like the characters in Richard Hooker’s M*A*S*H Goes to Maine:

            Laurie’s niece, Nancy Barnes, knew that it’s quicker to drive four miles in the area of Eagle Head than to make a phone call, so she jumped into her car, drove to the home of Tony Holcombe, found him mowing his lawn and gave him the word. Tony responded by mounting his station wagon and driving to Nancy’s house with all the enthusiasm, if not the skill, of Stirling Moss.

That’s the Maine I remember from my childhood (though I had to Google Stirling Moss.) In Blue Hill we had a name for new arrivals from larger places: Straphanger. Sometimes it was shortened to just “Strap.” But the reference was clear: people on public buses sometimes stand, and hang onto a strap. Blue Hill had no public buses.

Maine once had much more robust public transportation than it does now. The Automobile Age killed most of it off. But consider this: the roots of the car culture don’t go that deep. Interstate 95 north of Augusta is younger than I am. It hasn’t long been possible to blast from Bangor to Waterville in under an hour. Now people do it every day, to the point where the proliferation of cars and trucks threatens the ecosystem, the economy, and our quality of life. But it’s going to be hard to convince the lifelong car owner that maybe there’s a better way. It took a lot to convince me.

Nonetheless, it’s imperative that we try. Cars are choking the planet. The average worker, when liberated from the obligation of car ownership, has thousands more dollars annually to spend on more sustainable and economically beneficial goods and services. But public transportation always faces the same Catch-22: More people would use it if service were more frequent, but governing bodies don’t want to ramp up service until more people use it.

I turned in the car on Friday and took the bus home. You have to call the dispatcher because the airport isn’t on the Community Connector’s regular route. Still, I was glad to be free of the car – a white Kia with a sloped back and blind spots that could touch 90 miles an hour on the Interstate before I even noticed. Everyone was going at least 75. We live such frantic lives.

It had rained on the coast and I brought back the car filthy but full, sixty dollars and change for all the gas I used, at four-something a gallon. People are grumbling about gas prices. What they should be upset about is not having the choice to spend the money on bus or train fare instead.

Collateral Damage

Hank Garfield

It’s winter where I live, in the northeast corner of the United States, and for the past few weeks, most of the streets have been bracketed by high snowbanks. The plows have made the roads passable, but the same cannot be said for the sidewalks, which on many mornings freeze into something resembling a luge run with lumps. For those of us who walk, this presents a stark choice: risk a broken ankle, or walk on the street and take our chances with the cars.

Among other things, Covid-19 curtailed our addiction to driving. People worked from home and didn’t go out as much. This resulted in a steep reduction in the total miles Americans drove in 2020 and 2Car021, and could have been a silver lining to all of this. One might expect to see a corresponding decrease in road deaths – but in fact, the opposite happened. People drove less, but the number of car crash deaths went up. 

Why? What’s going on here?

The statistics are particularly grim for pedestrians and cyclists, the most vulnerable users of our public roads. One theory blames the super-sizing of American vehicles. Hummers and behemoth pickup trucks may give the driver a feeling of tank-like invincibility, but they can wipe out a pedestrian like a cargo ship running down a sailboat. The hoods of some of these vehicles are as high as the heads of the people crossing the street in front of them. A person in a wheelchair is practically invisible.

Combine that with the still-prevalent roads-are-for-cars get-out-of-my-way attitude of too many drivers, and the overall disintegration of civility in our public discourse, and you have a recipe for disaster. 

It’s not just drivers who are acting out. Every day we read about fights on airplanes, assaults on health care workers, screaming school board meetings. 

Is it really surprising that some drivers might vent their pandemic frustrations by driving too fast and too aggressively on less-crowded roads? Decades of macho automobile advertising have marginalized non-drivers, and taught generations of drivers to view pedestrians and cyclists as at best nuisances and at worst collateral damage. Government and business have piled on with practices that favor drivers: free parking, lack of walking city centers and communities, anemic public transportation, and poor sidewalk maintenance.

To be fair, drivers have legitimate concerns. It IS hard to see a dark-clad pedestrian at night, and it IS easier to keep a well-traveled roadway clear of ice than a sidewalk. Potholes ARE a problem and need to be fixed. But those of us on foot and bicycle help pay for the roads with our tax dollars, too, and we are coequal users of this public resource. It is high time for public policy and public behavior to reflect this.