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.

The Last Mile

Hank Garfield

Last month Lisa and I ventured out of Maine to see Bob Dylan perform in Mansfield, Massachusetts, south of Boston. We did 99 percent of the trip by public transportation. It’s easy to get from Bangor to Mansfield and back by bus and train. There isn’t a compelling reason to drive it, even if you own a working vehicle, which we do not. The problem is the last (or first) mile.

As I wrote in a recent post, transporting a dog can be challenging without a car. Fortunately, I have a few readers, and I’m happy to report that this blog stimulated the economy by creating a job. Rita got to the kennel, we got to the bus, and the process was reversed the next day.

We had booked a hotel within walking distance of the concert venue, formerly known as Great Woods, but now called the Xfinity Center. The train from Boston stopped in the center of Mansfield, by all appearances a nice New England town with a village green, well-kept homes, and a central commercial district. But the hotel and the Xfinity Center weren’t located close to anything except an interstate highway exit, some three miles away. It was in no way walkable.

What to do? A few people were around, including a guy about our age who had gotten off the train and, as it turned out, had ridden the same bus down from Maine and was staying at the same hotel and going to the same show. Unlike me, he has conquered the entrance exam for Uber, and we all shared a ride, arriving at the hotel around 3:30.

The concert started at five with an opening act (one of four acts in total), and the hotel bar and restaurant opened at five. A poor bit of planning, I thought, especially since we hadn’t had lunch. The desk clerk at the hotel named a couple of restaurants a couple miles down the road, which was of course useless information to people without a car.

Maybe because I was hungry and a bit irritated, I decided to press my luck. “Do we get a discount on our room because we’re not using a parking space?” I asked.

He laughed, as if the question were ridiculous.

But I remember staying at a hotel in Quebec City many years ago, where the policy was just that: one charge for the room, and a separate charge for the parking space. It was nominal, I think about twelve dollars, but if you got there without a car, it was twelve bucks you didn’t have to pay. And why should you? By including parking in the price of the room, the hotel is effectively making you subsidize the cost of parking even when you don’t park. But we are so accustomed to accommodating cars and their owners that most people don’t see it as unfair.

The next morning, I asked at the front desk if we could get a cab back to the train station. The bad news was that, as in many places in the US., Uber has effectively killed off the local cab companies. The good news was that the guy at the desk was extremely polite and helpful, and called us an Uber on the hotel’s dime.

Still, I must wonder: why doesn’t the Xfinity Center provide a shuttle between the train station and the hotel on event nights? Why do they assume that everybody is going to arrive and depart by car, and why are there so few alternatives for those who don’t?

What we have here is an illustration of the “last mile” problem in public transportation. It’s easy to get from one transit hub to another. But only a car can take you from the front steps of your house to the gates of a concert venue. Does that make it worthwhile to drive from Bangor to southern Massachusetts? Obviously not. But the last mile problem discourages people from using public transportation even when it’s the most convenient option. Cities, towns and businesses that benefit from visitors must work together to come up with better solutions.

Drive-Thru Nation

Hank Garfield

For a time in the 1980s I lived in Julian, California, a small town high in the mountains east of San Diego. The last town of any size on the road, 22 miles before Julian, is Ramona, an agricultural community with a wide main street reminiscent of “Gunsmoke” and “High Noon.” It’s the last agglomeration of fast-food restaurants and chain grocery stores before the highway heads up over the mountains and into the desert beyond.

There was a chicken farm not far from Ramona, before the road begins to climb in earnest. Eggs were sold from a little shack in a generous dirt pull-off next to the highway. It was a good place to stop, stretch your legs, and pick up some eggs before negotiating the last miles of winding mountain road on the long drive from the populated cities near the coast.

I remember when they installed drive-thru service. It cracked me up, because the farm was in the middle of nowhere, and who was in a hurry to get to Julian? But you could now drive around the back of the shack, buy your farm-fresh eggs like a cheeseburger, and continue along your merry way without ever getting out of the car.

Forty years later, it still seems funny to me. But it was a harbinger of things to come. Two years ago, I wrote about being unable to get a cup of coffee in the lobby of a Dunkin’ Donuts while a line of cars waited at the drive-thru. In Bangor and Rockland, Dunkin’ franchises post signs warning drivers not to block the street when the drive-thru backs up. Meanwhile, inside space and service has diminished as customers opt to wait in a line of cars rather than people.

Dunkin’ Donuts was once a friendly place instead of an ATM for good coffee and cheap food. There was a Dunkin’ in Ellsworth on the corner of Main and High Street, and people would gather before work in the mornings to drink coffee from thick-walled mugs, and to talk with fellow human beings instead of ordering into an impersonal speaker. It’s long gone now, of course, replaced by an out-of-town pit stop a couple miles away with a larger footprint, a smaller seating area, and a wrap-around line for cars. No one arrives on foot, and no one talks to one another.

We live in Drive-Thru Nation now. Banking, prescriptions, eggs – you name it, you can likely get it through a car window. Is this a good thing? Perhaps if you’ve got five minutes to get to work and you’ve forgotten to eat breakfast and you’re willing to wait in your car as if you’re stopped for road construction, it might seem convenient. But why are we all running around in such a hurry in the first place, to the point where we can’t take the time for the small personal interactions that help sustain communities?

From the public expectation of free parking (I prefer to call it “socialized parking”), to the Wal-Martization of towns that once boasted an array of small and varied businesses, the destructive costs of our car-driven lifestyles are both widely apparent and widely accepted.

But what if customers had to pay an extra dollar at Dunkin’ Donuts and the Ramona egg farm to use the drive-thru? Would drivers still flock to them? Or would they take the incentive to re-connect, if only for a few minutes, with their fellow citizens?

The dollars could go toward public transportation, bike paths, downtown green spaces and walkable commercial zones. They could fund infrastructure that steers the incentives away from the isolation of cars toward the inclusion of community.

For the past three-quarters of a century, the United States has promoted cars and built transportation systems almost exclusively for car owners. Business and government have been equally complicit. It’s time to have a national conversation about this, over a cup of coffee that hasn’t been passed through a car window.