Author: Hank Garfield

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.

“I Can’t Take You Anywhere”

Hank Garfield
Rita at the recent eclipse in Greenville

Our dog is incorrigible in a car.

She isn’t in them often, and seldom in the same one twice since we went from a one-car to a no-car household about a year ago. But even in Lisa’s Jeep she was terrible. She chewed through a seatbelt the first time we left her alone. She barks, growls and snarls at every pedestrian she sees. In rental cars, she’s figured out how to open the power windows herself. She’ll lunge at motorcycles, other dogs, even oncoming trucks. She’ll invade the front seat and position herself at the center of the windshield, alert for all threats, real and imagined. She’ll lean on the driver or the front-seat passenger when the car goes around a curve. She’s a little better when she rides shotgun, but not much.

Rita, or sometimes Rita Mae, is a four-year old mix of possibly Rottweiler, Shar-pei, and some kind of hound (we don’t really know), with an abundant exuberance for life. We’ve had her for a little over two years. She’s personable but protective, sixty-odd pounds of potential energy that can turn kinetic in a hurry. Ask the mailman, the pizza delivery guy, or the two cops who pulled Lisa over for a missing taillight.

Bottling up all that energy in a car makes for interesting travels. But how else are you supposed to take your dog to the vet, or to the beach, or a total eclipse of the sun? Come to think of it, how are you going to get her to the kennel when you want to get away for a few days?

Veterinarians all seem to have offices on the outskirts of town. The kennel is a 35-minute walk from our house – doable for both of us, but logistically difficult, and it doesn’t open in the morning until after the Concord Coach bus has already departed for the coast. The Community Connector bus allows service dogs, but regular dogs must be in a carrier. I’m not strong enough to lift Rita plus carrier onto the bus. I would have to get a Flintstone model, with holes for the dog’s legs, and I doubt that such a thing is available, or that Rita would put up with it. And would she behave on a bus full of strangers?

Is there a dog taxi service in Bangor? Would a regular taxi – if you can get one – allow a dog? Uber is problematic enough without throwing a largish, excitable dog into the mix. That leaves rental cars and dog-tolerant friends. It seems ridiculous to rent a car for the day to take the dog to the vet, but part of not owning a car is taking responsibility for your own transportation needs. Most friends are happy to do an occasional favor, but you can’t make a habit of it. No one likes a freeloader.

Dogs don’t depend on cars, but dog owners often must. It seems like a good business model: take people and their dogs to various appointments and outings, at a cost less than a 24-hour car rental. There must be other dog owners without cars who would use such a service.

Some surely choose to take the path of least resistance (but most expense) and buy a car: another example of the American car culture creating a perceived necessity of something that should be one among several options. Vets and kennels don’t all need to be in outlying areas. Services should exist at reasonable cost for transporting pets and their owners. Not everyone wants to own a car, but much of our transportation infrastructure is built around the assumption that most people do. Rita’s attitude toward cars is much like mine: if it’s the only way to get there, then I guess I’ll put up with it. She acts out a lot more than I do, but that’s forgivable in a four-year old.

I’m not buying a car just for a dog who doesn’t behave in cars. A lot of people don’t behave in cars, either. What they – we – really need are viable alternatives.