The Hampden Town Council will vote this Monday, July 20, on whether to continue to fund Saturday bus service. If they vote no, Saturday runs along the Hampden route will end on August 1. The meeting is at 7 pm in the council chambers of the Hampden Municipal Building.

It will be sad if, on the anniversary of the moon landing, the council takes one giant leap backward for its non car-owning residents. It will also be shortsighted, because public transportation is good for the economy. Reliable bus service can enable a family to give up an extra car, and they will spend a good deal of the money they save at local businesses. As several people pointed out at last week’s public hearing in Bangor, we are having the wrong discussion.

I’ve been to a few of these meetings now. Regular bus rider Andrea Rankin and others commented that it is annoying to have to repeatedly fight proposed cuts in service. The conversation we should be having is how to expand the bus system and make it better. People are starting to discover, even in Maine, that car ownership need not be a de facto requirement for full participation in the community. Others don’t own a car because they can’t afford one. Still others have physical issues that prevent them from driving.

The Community Connector bus system is paid for by a roughly one-third formula of money from fares, local governments, and the federal government. As I’ve pointed out previously in this blog, cars sitting in driveways suck up more tax dollars than buses. Yet public transportation makes a convenient target for those who want to trim town budgets by cutting services they don’t use.

What’s driving the attack on Saturday bus service, though, isn’t class warfare but a petty little grudge match between Bangor and Hampden. According to Hampden councilor Bill Shakespeare, Bangor isn’t paying its fair share. The Hampden bus serves Shaw’s, Hollywood Casino, and Beal College, all within the city limits of Bangor. Many riders on the route never enter Hampden at all. It should be called the South Bangor-Hampden route, and the cost should be shared, Shakespeare said. Local costs of the so-called “VOOT” route, which serves Veazie, Orono and Old Town, are apportioned fairly; why not do the same with the Hampden route?

Shakespeare has a point. But it’s a small point. And to “shut down the run and force the issue,” as Hampden resident Jeremy W. Jones suggested, puts the weight of a disagreement between two municipal governments squarely on the backs of people least able to carry it. What may seem like sound fiscal policy to a guy with two cars in the garage can mean the difference between working and unemployment for someone who relies on the bus. It’s a cruel solution that’s worse than the problem it purports to solve.

I’m not going to weigh in on who should pay for what, but this threat to shut down a vital service to prove a point is emblematic of what’s wrong with our politics, from the local to the national level. Hampden may be paying more than its fair share, but Hampden also owes its existence as a wealthy bedroom community to the proximity of Bangor. The city provides the jobs that enable Hampden residents to earn good salaries, a minuscule portion of which they are asked to kick in for a minimal public transportation system that serves the entire, larger community.

The annual cost to each Hampden taxpayer to maintain Saturday bus service is about the cost of a beer at a local bar. It’s a drop in the bucket for a town with a municipal budget of $6.8 million. Instead of sacrificing a needed service over a territorial squabble and a few dollars per person, maybe we should have a “Bus Riders and Taxpayers Beer Night,” and call it good.

We could do it near the holidays. It would generate all kinds of good will, between bus riders and critics of the bus. It could lead to new ideas on how to improve and grow and streamline the service. We could have it at a bar in Hampden, further stimulating the local economy.

Oh, wait. Are there any bars in Hampden? And will we have to drive to get there?

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My parents always had two cars. We were a family of seven, plus assorted dogs and cats, and the cars were usually station wagons, parked in the circular driveway in front of our three-story house in the Philadelphia suburbs.

My father taught at a high school in the city, and my two oldest sisters and I attended the adjacent elementary school. We rode into Philadelphia with him in the mornings, with several older kids from the families of friends. His Mercury station wagon had a back-facing rumble seat from which my sisters and I could make faces at the drivers behind us.

The trip was 13 miles, one way. At one point I had the route memorized. The last street was Germantown Avenue, which had trolleys hooked up to overhead wires and cobblestones instead of asphalt.

We lived in what seemed like the country, between two cornfields and a cow pasture. My sisters and I could walk across one of them to an ice cream shop without touching pavement. Decades later, our old house is long gone; not a stalk of corn or a cow remains. It’s all housing developments, office buildings, and parking lots.

Maybe my parents saw the future, and Maine was their response. My father bought into a former summer camp on Deer Isle, at the end of a series of progressively smaller roads. Every year when school ended, we loaded up the station wagons for the twelve-hour drive, leaving at night, with the seats down and sleeping bags spread out across the back. My sisters and I loved those road trips. The sun came up somewhere around the Portsmouth traffic circle. We took the turnpike to Falmouth, then up the coast: over the drawbridge at Bath, lunch at a favorite rest area near Wiscasset, maybe an ice cream at Crosby’s in Bucksport, which is still there. We moved to Maine year-round the year I turned ten.

Maine was where I learned to drive, on a private dirt road in a rusting 1960 Jeep with standard-H shifting and iffy brakes. The first car I owned was an International Travel-All I bought from my mother for four hundred bucks. I still think she ripped me off. We called it “the Monster.” It had four-wheel drive and a stick shift as long as my arm, and by the time it came to me it had been pretty well beaten to death by an exuberant, careless family.

Things went quickly and predictably wrong. I replaced one wheel bearing, and then another, to the tune of several hundred bucks apiece. Then the gas tank fell off while I was driving. Meanwhile, the Monster’s body was being eaten away by car cancer. My parents had once mired it on a sand bar and watched helplessly as the ocean swirled around it – which explained why I never knew which body part was going to fall off next. It had to be the most expensive $400 vehicle in history.

That car almost killed me a couple of times. Once the gas tank fell off while I was driving. Another time the hood flew up in my face when a truck whooshed by in the other direction. By the time I finally sold it for junk, the Monster was more rust than metal.

My last car was a Ford Escort wagon I bought from my son for $600 when he went to college. It had been my mother’s car before that. My son had decided not to have a car at school, partially because he did not want to pay the inflated insurance rates that accrue when you get two speeding tickets before your seventeenth birthday.

The head gasket blew five months after I took the car off his hands. When I told him this sad news over the phone, he said, “What did you do to it?”

And that was it – my last car, like my first, a cast-off from my family.

In between, I’ve had new cars and old cars, cars I’ve loved and cars I’ve loathed, automatics and standards, vans and pickup trucks, vehicles made in Europe and Japan and America, pieces of crap and pieces of culture. I’ve driven cars owned by friends and cars owned by co-workers. I’ve had driving jobs: a school bus, a taxi. At different times I’ve been a long-distance commuter and my kids’ transportation to school. I’ve been a full, willing participant in the American Car Culture.

No more.

I’ve been thinking about my father lately, because he died nine years ago this week in an automobile accident. He was one of 42,642 deaths on American roads in 2006, an annual slaughter we apparently consider an acceptable cost for our motorized way of life.¹

You might think there’s something Freudian in my subsequent decision to give up car ownership, but the truth is I was already souring on cars. It wasn’t until May of that year that I moved from a small town on the coast to Bangor, where a car-free life is possible, and even then it took me until the end of the year to cut the cord.

My Dad and I disagreed about a lot of things. He leaned conservative and I lean liberal, so we had plenty of fodder for lively political discussions. But he did teach me a valuable lesson about courtesy. He had a nice phrase for it, too. He used to say that courtesy is the grease that keeps the machinery of society running. When I was younger, and surer of everything, I pooh-poohed this as the faux wisdom of an old man. He didn’t live to see the rise of social media. But nowhere is his lesson on courtesy more needed.

Express an opinion on Facebook, or a blog, or any on-line forum, and within about three comments someone is likely to call you a fool, a traitor, or worse. Recently I was trying to make the point that taxpayer-funded public transportation can save a family the cost of owning and maintaining a second vehicle (around $9,000 per year on average, according to the American Automobile Association), and was not so cordially invited to shut up, with the added admonition that I was obviously “just another loud-mouth dolt.”

Few of us would say that to someone’s face, but computer screens and cars seem to shield people from the immediate consequences of being rude. I’ve had horrible things yelled at me from passing cars when I’m on my bicycle. I’ve been flipped off more times than I can count. I have heard drivers express the opinion that bicycling on public roadways should be outlawed, that bicyclists are nuisances, that we are dangerous. Bicycles aren’t killing more than thirty thousand Americans a year.² Cars are dangerous.

I do realize that bicyclists and pedestrians and bus passengers can be rude, too. But they are not cocooned behind a windshield or a user name. Recently I was on a bus with a young woman carrying on a loud, lengthy cell phone conversation. You could hear her all over the bus. I finally approached her and asked politely if she could wrap it up. She responded with a stream of invective. I told her she was being rude to her fellow passengers, and she replied, “I don’t care.” After I had meekly returned to my seat, the guy across from her leaned over and said, “Will you shut the fuck up?” She told her friend on the phone that people were harassing her and she had to go. Message delivered, in a language she understood. Would the guy have spoken up if I hadn’t said anything? I don’t know.

It doesn’t kill you to be polite. Courtesy can be the difference between reason and resentment, between an agreement to disagree and the harboring of hard feelings. It isn’t always easy, but practicing courtesy is always worth the effort. On line, it can foster respect. On the road, it can literally save lives.

1 – Figures are from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

2 – The 2013 figure was 32,719, including 4,735 pedestrians and 743 cyclists. Fatalities dropped sharply following the 2008 recession and gas price spike.