Maine

When Driving Isn’t An Option

Hank Garfield

One-third of Americans don’t or can’t drive. In Maine, according to the Moving Maine Network, some 83,000 adults don’t have a driver’s license. One might think that this represents a potent constituency for change in our transportation system.

It should. But public policy tends to be made by people with access to automobiles, usually their own. The one-third figure makes non-drivers a significant minority, but a minority nonetheless. Voters are much more likely to approve a new highway than they are to support expanded bus service and bicycle lanes.

We who are physically able to drive and have the financial wherewithal to own vehicles tend to dismiss the needs and desires of those who can’t drive. A few weeks ago, I picked up a new book titled When Driving Is Not An Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency. I also got to meet and briefly chat with the author, Anna Letitia Zivarts, who describes herself as “a low-vision mom and non-driver.” She was born with a neurological condition called nystagmus, which renders her unable to operate a motor vehicle.

I can’t honestly describe myself as a non-driver. My license is current, and my credit card information is on file at Budget Rent-a-Car, which I use about a dozen times a year. Zivarts has a term for people like me: “choice” non-drivers. I could, if I wanted to, take out a car loan and make monthly payments and buy insurance and go in for regular oil changes and buy new snow tires every Maine winter. Been there, done that.

Those car rentals, depending on the season, cost me about a hundred dollars a day. The most up-to-date estimate from the American Automobile Association of the average annual cost of owning a vehicle is above $12,000. This means that I could rent a car 120 times a year – every three days – before it would cost as much as owning one.

But Zivarts’s book is not about people like me, though she welcomes us into what she calls “the non-driver movement.” It made me stop and think about many of my fellow citizens whom I see regularly on the bus, and who don’t have a choice, when beset by something like a pandemic, to retreat into the privacy of their cars.

What I am is a non-car owner, a cumbersome phrase that describes my choice not to spend money supporting an exclusionary infrastructure. Though I quit cars mostly for economic reasons, I am concerned about the automobile’s effects on climate, land use, and increasingly belligerent public behavior.

Zivarts focuses, rightly, on people forcibly excluded from the car culture for physical or financial reasons. When I gave up car ownership, I discovered that I needed to plan my days and weeks more effectively. I needed to schedule appointments with transportation foremost on my mind. I had to shop more locally and at a smaller scale. I had to look at bus routes before renting an apartment. Of necessity, I walked more. Sometimes I passed on social events because I could not get there.

This is everyday life for people who can’t drive. Yet businesses, hospitals, schools, and local governments, with the tacit approval of car owners, effectively discriminate against one-third of the population. Most businesses provide free parking for their employees but not free bus passes. (The University of Maine, where I work, is a laudable exception.) Many hospital procedures require a patient to be accompanied by a driver. Bike racks are hard to find at most shopping malls and big-box stores.

Zivarts argues for change in public policy, but more importantly, for change in public attitudes. “Car-dependent communities aren’t just failing those of us who can’t drive,” she writes. “They are failing everyone.” Just as more bicycles on the road make driving safer by forcing drivers to be more alert and aware, so do options other than driving make towns and cities more pleasant places to live.

“What nondrivers need – what we all need – is a transformation of the way we organize mobility, housing, and public space so that we have options for getting around that do not rely on driving a car,” Zivarts writes. Amen to that.

When Driving Is Not An Option is available from Island Press.

Where Have All the Small Stores Gone?

Hank Garfield

A packet of jigsaw blades fits easily into a pocket of my autumn jacket. It so happened that I needed a blade on a recent November afternoon, and I had to think a minute on the easiest way to get one.

There used to be a hardware store in Penobscot Plaza that I could walk to. There used to be one on Broadway that was easy to reach to by bus. But they are gone. With a twinge of sadness, I realized that my best option was Home Depot, out on Stillwater Avenue, one of Bangor’s busiest car corridors. I slung my bicycle onto the Community Connector bus and headed off to the nearest corporate megastore to buy an item smaller than my hand.

We had been doing a home construction project, the lovely Lisa and I, and so far, everything too heavy or too bulky to carry home had been delivered. But sometimes you need to run out and get something. This is when owning a car can seem like a necessity – or at least an awfully handy convenience.

The store is set back from the street by a massive parking lot, sectioned off by raised asphalt islands into smaller lots. There is no designated bus stop, no sidewalk or walkway for pedestrians. Nor are any bike racks in evidence. Bus passengers must navigate the parking lot on foot, and bicyclists at their peril. I locked my bike to an outdoor display of garden tools and went in to find my blades.

As I pedaled home through the car traffic, I pondered the absurdity of operating a two thousand-pound, gas-burning, space-occupying machine to obtain one pocket-sized package of saw blades. Doesn’t anybody consider this, well, wasteful?

It’s bad enough for someone like me, who has chosen not to own a car and to live with the inconveniences. It’s worse for people who have no choice: those who can’t drive, due to medical, financial, or other reasons.

In 1999, I packed my kids, the dog, the cat, and all our worldly belongings into an Aerostar van and a U-Haul trailer and moved from California to Maine. We tried to take local roads instead of the Interstate when we could. As we went through Illinois and Indiana, we began to sense the same story in every town. The brick post office and a church or two in the old town center, and then, a mile or more away, at the junction with the highway, a cluster of the same 15 or 20 corporate businesses. The same chains in every town. I hoped it would never happen to Maine.

But it has. It just took a quarter of a century longer to happen here. You can no longer walk down to Joe’s Hardware Store and buy a rake, or a set of jigsaw blades, or anything else you might need. You have been handed another reason to own and drive a car, and another alternative has been eliminated.

It’s not just hardware stores. Downtown of small cities like Bangor seem to be replete with restaurants and bars and places to buy art or antiques, but mostly devoid of outlets for the practical items of day-to-day life. I’ve had similar problems getting ink cartridges, fresh fruit, cleaning supplies, clothing, and scotch tape. The whole idea of walkable cities and downtowns is predicated on the idea that people can live, work and shop in a small area. If you must go to an outlying box store to get what you need, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Shouldn’t city planners be considering this when they draw up zoning regulations?

Car ownership would not seem like such a necessity in an environment where Joe’s Hardware could coexist with Home Depot. But powerful forces seem to want as many of us to drive and own cars as possible. Never mind the millions of Americans excluded from such a system, or the damage our dependence on cars inflicts on the natural world. The car is encouraged and incentivized at every turn.

But we can do something about it, however small and incremental. We can patronize pedestrian-friendly businesses. We can eschew drive-throughs. As much as possible, we can avoid the big-box stores. There isn’t always a choice. That’s why we need to use the choices we still have.

An Accumulation of Small Annoyances

Hank Garfield

When you decide to give up car ownership, two things will happen. You will walk more. And you will become, almost by default, an advocate for public transportation. Neither of these is a bad thing.

It helps if you live in a walkable community with both local and out-of-town bus service. In Bangor, we have the Community Connector and the Concord Coach bus systems. I hate to say anything negative about either of them, because I use them both a lot, and they are as essential to me as a parking space is to a car owner. On many mornings, I have walked the two blocks from my house up to the bus stop, boarded the Community Connector, ridden to the Concord Coach depot, and headed out of town.

Recently the Community Connector went to a fixed-stop system, which makes the routes more efficient and improves the reliability of the whole system. But there is no fixed stop at the Concord Coach depot. Riders transferring from one bus system to the other must get off the Community Connector at a sign down the block and walk approximately 100 yards, the length of an American football field. This isn’t a problem for a healthy person, but what of an older or physically challenged passenger with luggage? It makes no sense.

Twice now, I’ve had drivers refuse to let me off at the Concord Coach depot. They insist, as per the new rules, that I get off at the sign and walk. Then the bus continues on, right past the depot.

Small annoyances like this are a big reason more people don’t use public transportation. It would not take any longer for the driver to let transferring passengers off at the depot rather than the sign. But rules are rules, and they must be followed to the letter.

Concord Coach has rules of its own. The driver won’t let you off anywhere but at the depot. The afternoon bus from the coast arrives in Bangor at 5:30. This is five minutes too late to catch the last inbound Community Connector toward downtown. Sometimes I’ll see that bus after the Concord Coach gets off the interstate on Union Street.

In Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, where I lived for a year, there is regular bus service to Sofia, the capital, about an hour and a half away. The bus goes directly from one city to the other, but once in Sofia, it makes stops at major intersections to let passengers off who don’t need to go to the central bus station. This makes eminent sense, and provides a friendlier and more convenient experience for passengers. But Concord Coach won’t do it. Rules are rules.

The Community Connector drivers will routinely ask passengers if they need to make a connection to another Community Connector bus. Similarly, the Concord Coach driver will ask passengers coming up the coast if they need to connect to the Cyr bus to Aroostook County. They will hold the buses for a few minutes if anyone answers in the affirmative.

But I’ve never heard a Community Connector driver ask if anyone needs to meet a Concord Coach bus, or vice versa. There seems to be little effort to coordinate the services. Bangor once had a downtown Greyhound bus terminal, but that has disappeared over the horizon to Hermon, where the Community Connector has no service at all.

This isn’t just a local problem. It’s representative of the American piecemeal approach to public transportation. There’s no centralized clearinghouse for ready information on how to navigate from one system to another. The result is an accumulation of minor irritations like missed connections and forced walks and strict adherence to rules that ought to be more flexible. None of these things are debilitating by themselves. But an accumulation of them will discourage people from leaving their cars at home.

I’ve talked with many people who support public transportation and want to demonstrate demand by using it more. My answer to them is that they should use it anyway, even if it’s inconvenient, because transportation planners look at current numbers. It’s the only way to get past the circular argument that public transportation is unpopular in the present and therefore a poor investment in the future.

Public transportation seems unpopular because official policy incentivizes people to drive. If you want better and more comprehensive public transportation, invest some of your time in using what’s already here, despite the accumulation of tiny annoyances that discourage people from using it.