Bangor Community Connector

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.

All My Uber Trials

Hank Garfield

Why do people think Uber is simple to use and the public bus system is complicated?

It’s exactly the opposite.

Recently, I decided to up my car non-ownership game and sign up for Uber. I’ve had great success living in Bangor, Maine for the past 17 years without owning a car. I sing the praises of the Community Connector bus system. I rejoiced with my fellow riders when the downtown Bangor Area Transit Center opened in December 2022. But the buses run only during the day, and they can’t go everywhere. It’s tough to get a taxi in Bangor, for whatever reasons. So, I thought I’d give Uber a shot.

I downloaded the app onto my smartphone, no problem. I was a bit surprised that it didn’t ask for my credit card information. Friends assured me that I would be asked to enter it the first time I used the service. After that, they said, the service would be seamless.

I wasn’t at home the first time I needed a ride. I rarely need rides from home, as I live within walking distance of town and the Transit Center. I lined up a ride, and sure enough, the app asked for my credit card info, which I dutifully plugged in. But then it wanted to send two micro-payments to my credit card. I was to report the exact amounts of the payments for verification. The only problem was that I don’t do banking on my cell phone, and I was miles from my laptop.

Fine, I thought. The next time, I would schedule the ride in advance, from home, where I could access my credit card account. (None of these steps were spelled out in advance.) However, the first two times I tried this, I got a message: “pickup location unavailable.” I have yet to take my first ride.

All this is preamble to an observation that gets more and more cemented in my psyche with each passing day.

When I posted the first two sentences of this piece on Facebook, my friend Félix, who lives in Bulgaria, replied (and I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting him here): “the public bus system is a public service and Uber is a twisted organization that tries to make their greed and consumerist anxiety look like sociality and coolness.”

As the Brits say, spot on.

I was trying to help Lisa get to and from a business on the other side of town. After striking out with Uber, I walked to the Transit Center, where a dispatcher (whose name I don’t know but who deserves praise) helped me plan the most convenient route. The bus driver was also helpful, showing us where we would need to be, and at what time, for the return trip.

There is no one to call at Uber for such assistance. And this is par for the course when a private company tries to masquerade as public service. When was the last time you called any private enterprise and did not have to navigate a series of automated prompts before connecting with a human being?

The bus system isn’t perfect. It needs longer hours. Paying passengers taking multiple rides in one day can’t use the transfer system for brief stops. Still, I hate to criticize it, because despite its imposed limitations, it works well. Anybody who can read a printed schedule can use it, and it’s inexpensive and reliable.

The great lie of the post-Reagan era is that the private sector is more efficient than the public. The focus of public services is convenience for the end-user. The focus of private enterprise is convenience (and profit) for the owners of the business. This is happening across society. To see a doctor, you used to make an appointment and show up. Now you must navigate a maze of pre-registration, pre-pre-registration, on-line verification, and electronic confirmation. To get a cup of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, you have to “interface” with a touch-screen menu when the guy who’s going to pour your coffee is standing right there, getting an order ready for the drive-thru. And don’t get me started on self-checkout at the grocery store.

More and more, the end-user (the customer) is required to navigate steps in the service process that should be handled by competent, knowledgeable staff. Rather than hire and train and pay employees, companies are increasingly putting the customer last, by making them take on more of the tasks they are supposedly paying for.

Don’t get me wrong: business does many wonderful things. But public services, like education, health care, and especially public transportation, aren’t among them.