I sing the praises of the Concord Coach bus system. It gets me from Bangor to Rockland and back at times of day that suit my schedule. The bus trip takes only a few minutes longer than the drive. And the price — $36 round trip – is reasonable.

Every day at 7 a.m., and also at 11 a.m. in the summer, two buses leave the Concord Coach station on Union Street in Bangor. One is the express to Portland and Boston, with a single stop in Augusta. The other is the coastal route, which serves Rockland and several other towns. The express is often packed and never less than half-full. As I write this, I’ve just left Bangor on the 11 o’clock coastal bus with three other passengers.

The bus always picks up more passengers in Belfast, Camden, and at stops in Rockland and beyond. Most of them are bound for Portland or Boston, like their counterparts who boarded the express in Bangor. But I often wonder why this part of the route is so thinly used. Why don’t more Bangorians visit the midcoast by bus?

I think it’s because they don’t think about it. Or if they do, driving seems more straightforward and cost-effective. We are conditioned to think this way by the car culture we all grew up in, and the economic decisions we make reflect those values.

But we Americans live in a rigged market, where every incentive favors driving. It’s not this way everywhere, as I learned during my time in Bulgaria.

The driving distance between Bangor and Rockland is 63 miles. The driving distance between Blagoevgrad and Sofia is 105 kilometers, or 65 miles – the same, for the purpose of the rough comparison I will do here. The time it takes to drive is likewise similar.

A bus ticket from Bangor to Rockland costs $18 if you buy a round-trip ticket; the one-way fare is $20. The return ticket is good for a year. A ticket from Blagoevgrad to Sofia is 10 leva, or about $6, with no open-ended round-trip discount. The price of gas in Maine is currently around $2.50 per gallon. The price of gas in Bulgaria is about 2.2 leva per liter, or about $4.70 (in U.S. dollars) per U.S. gallon.

Let’s say you own a car that gets 25 miles per gallon. A driver in Bangor is going to spend six dollars for the gas to get to Rockland. (Of course, there are other expenses to driving, but that average American car owner, who is already absorbing those costs, thinks primarily about the cost of gas.) A driver in Bulgaria will spend the equivalent of around $11 to drive the same distance.

In Maine, the bus ticket costs three times the price of the gas to drive the same route. In Bulgaria, the gas costs twice as much as the bus ticket. So the average American weighs the costs and says, “I’ll just drive,” while the average Bulgarian makes the opposite choice. It helps, too, that the Bulgarian buses run every hour rather than just twice a day.

I can also tell you that in both Sofia and Blagoevgrad the bus station is right next to the train station. It’s easy to transition from one form of transportation to another. The Concord Coach station in Bangor is close to the airport, but not walkable, and there’s no regularly scheduled shuttle. It requires a cab. And the local Community Connector bus system stops running fifteen minutes before the evening buses from Rockland and Boston pull in, leaving passengers hung out to dry. The Greyhound stop, over the horizon in Hermon, is even worse.

The Rockland bus station is at the ferry terminal, in the center of town. But most of the Concord Coach stops aren’t nearly as accessible. The stop for Camden, for example, is at a convenience store (convenient for drivers) two miles out of town.  It’s one of the least friendly bus stops I’ve ever seen. The store is often closed when the bus arrives. One can only take from this that Camden doesn’t want, or at best, doesn’t care about, visitors who arrive by bus.

Obviously, the smart thing to do would be to raise gas taxes and put the money into improved and expanded public transportation. But it’s a tough sell in a rigged market. Even American liberals, who express concern about climate change and environmental degradation and sprawl, become protective of their car culture when it impacts their daily lives. Why shouldn’t they? It’s all they’ve ever known.

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