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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A recent visit to Washington, D.C. got me thinking about bicycles and government, in that order.

I arrived Sunday morning by bus from Richmond, Virginia, and departed by train that evening, leaving me some time to explore a city I had not visited since the Carter administration. Much had changed. I had never seen the Vietnam Memorial, for instance, and I had never navigated the city without a car. Both buses and trains use Union Station, close to the Capitol and the major tourist attractions. But the first thing I saw when I walked outside was a wall of bicycles.

The day was warm but surprisingly not humid. Many people were out walking, running, or bicycling. Some of the bicycles appeared to be privately owned, but many more belonged to a program called Capital Bikeshare, which makes bicycles available, for short periods of time, to the general public. The system is modeled on one pioneered in Montreal, and was the first of its kind in a major U.S. city, opening in 2010. Since then, similar services have debuted in New York, Boston, and Chicago.

According to the website, Capital Bikeshare provides 3,500 three-gear bicycles at some 350 stations throughout Washington and nearby communities in Maryland and Virginia. It’s a membership-based system you can join for a day, three days, a month, or a year, appealing to tourists, short-term visitors, and regular commuters. Your key enables you to pick up a bike at any “dock” and return it to any other. All rides under 30 minutes are free; trip fees apply thereafter.

The system is not without its flaws, or its detractors, as a brief Internet search reveals. Some destinations are more popular than others, resulting in full docks when one wants to drop off a bike. Sometimes bicycles need to be redistributed by truck. And the whole operation is supported by tax-funded entities, from municipal governments to the Federal Highway Administration and the Virginia Department of Rail and Transportation.

I didn’t use it. Instead, I walked, slowly, past the Capitol and the Garfield Memorial and the Air and Space Museum, down to other end of the Mall and the memorials to Martin Luther King, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and the tragedy of Vietnam. Afterwards I wandered past the statue of Albert Einstein and up one of the numbered streets until I found a bar showing multiple baseball games on a single screen. Tired of walking, I located a local bus, which cost a dollar, and rode back to Union Station.

Admittedly, I was only there for a day, a Sunday at that, and these observations should not be mistaken for comprehensive analysis. All I know is that I saw a lot of people happily using the bikes.

Critics contend that that the bicycle-sharing system is costly, and that it is used by a small and affluent slice of the population and not the low-income residents it was designed to help. As I have noted repeatedly, such criticism ignores the public costs of the pervasive car culture. Not only is driving heavily subsidized, until recently it has been encouraged by public policy to the virtual exclusion of every other form of transportation. We don’t expect our roads and parking lots to turn a profit. Nor should we expect it from bicycles and trains.

And it is a legitimate function of government to encourage desirable outcomes. The streets of any city are friendlier when they support more bicycles and fewer cars. The carbon footprint is smaller, the environmental impact less, the air cleaner and easier to breathe, the population healthier. It’s appropriate for our nation’s capital to pave the way for similar efforts in other American communities.

* *

I need to correct an error in last week’s post about bicycling to and from work between Bangor and Orono. I wrote that “paved bike lanes provide a buffer from automobile traffic” along much of the route.

Michele Yade Benoit pointed out that what I referred to as bike lanes are actually paved shoulders, not designated rights-of-way for cyclists. There are no official bicycle lanes in the Bangor area. She is correct. Thanks for reading, Michele, and for being vigilant.

Bangor may never grow large enough to justify an organized bicycle-sharing system like those in Washington or Boston. But a little paint, a little pavement, and a little signage could go a long way, at little cost, toward nudging more commuters toward more responsible transportation alternatives.

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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.