I didn’t get my sailboat to Rockland on time this year for the North Atlantic Blues Festival, but I did catch some of the action on the water during Friendship Sloop Days. The Rockland Lobster Festival begins August 2.

From Bangor, it’s easy to get to Rockland without a car, and you don’t need a boat to do it. If you want to attend the Lobster Festival but don’t want to face the parking or the summer traffic on Route One, you can hop on a Concord Coach bus at 7 or 11 in the morning, spend a day on the coast, and board a return bus at either 4:15 or 9:30.

Why more people don’t take advantage of this escapes me. The round-trip cost is only $34. For a larger group, it makes sense to take a vehicle, but for one or two people, the bus is cheaper, much more convenient, and it doesn’t take any longer than it does to drive.

Later in August comes the American Folk Festival in Bangor. One might expect a few folks from the Rockland area to attend. But if they want to do it by bus, they’re sunk. While the Concord Coach schedule works beautifully for Bangor residents who want to spend a day on the coast, there’s no reciprocal schedule that allows a similar day trip in the other direction.

Portland, yes – and Rockland is probably more culturally connected to Portland than Bangor anyway. One could get on the bus that I get off at just before 9 a.m. and be in Portland well before noon, with stops in Damariscotta, Bath, Brunswick, and a few other towns. This is, as a Concord Coach official told me once, “the bread and butter of the route.” Surprisingly few passengers ride between Rockland and Bangor. That might change if buses began running in both directions at both ends of the day.

But that’s the windy nature of public transportation in Maine. There’s more available than most people know about, but you need to know which direction it’s going when. In order to ride it effectively, you have to strategize. Maine has many public transportation services, but they are seldom interconnected.

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Downeast Transportation runs a number of buses in Hancock and Washington counties. It’s an impressive service for a sparsely populated area, one I admit I’ve seldom used. My folks live in Brooklin, which is served one day a week (Fridays) by a bus from Ellsworth. In theory, I could take the West bus from Bangor on Thursday afternoon, spend the night in Ellsworth, and board the bus for Brooklin at 7:20 the next morning. After a scenic tour of Deer Isle and Stonington, I would arrive at the Brooklin General Store at 9:20. From there I’d have to walk.

I’ve sailed there faster. Of course the same thing happens whether you travel by sailboat or bus. You wait for a favorable window. You see places you never intended to see. You go miles out of your way for small gains toward your destination. The journey itself is sometimes worth the time it takes. And sometimes it’s not.

There’s also a daily bus between Bangor and Caribou, run by Cyr Bus Line, on a similar schedule, arriving in Bangor midday and turning around a few hours later. And local services abound, from the Belfast Shopper up to Bangor’s Community Connector.

While I might wish and lobby for expanded public transportation in Maine for the future, I think a central place for information on what’s available now would be a small but significant step in the right direction. With a little help and a lot of patience, you can get there from here.

Perhaps a future mission of this blog should be to ride all the different bus services in eastern Maine and bring back a report. I would need people to put me up in Calais and Caribou and other far-flung places. Or – better idea – any readers out there who use any of these buses and want to share? Please contact me at the Slower Traffic page on Facebook.

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You can plan a sailing trip, but sometimes wind and waves have other ideas.

Thus it was that we ended up in Camden, instead of Rockland (where the boat lives) on a recent Sunday evening.

We had planned to take the late Concord Coach bus home to Bangor. It leaves the Rockland ferry terminal at 9:30 – plenty of time to put the boat to bed on its own mooring and grab some dinner.

But a strong southerly wind and an incoming tide hindered our progress, by both sail and motor, down West Penobscot Bay. By six o’clock it became painfully obvious that we were not going to make Rockland by nightfall.

We ducked instead into Camden Harbor, rented a mooring for the night, and made plans to put the lovely Lisa, who had a job to get back to the next morning, on the bus, while I stayed with the boat.

The bus stop in Camden isn’t in Camden at all. It’s two miles out of town, just over the Rockport line, at a convenience store on Route One. The store inconveniently closes at 8 pm, at least on Sunday. The bus comes by at 9:45, but there’s nothing to do there except hang out under the lights with the mosquitoes. The nearest place to get a cup of coffee is a Hannaford, on the other side of the highway back towards town.

“This is why everybody has cars,” Lisa said, as we sat on a curb with our coffee. It was nine and the store was closing. “They make it so hard to do anything else.”

Indeed, why do bus stops always seem to be located in the most out-of-the way places? Rockland is an exception; the ferry terminal is right on Main Street, hard by the downtown business district. You can get a bite to eat and then walk five minutes to meet your bus. The same cannot be said of Camden, Belfast, and even Bangor, the third largest city in Maine.

The Concord Coach bus depot in Bangor is way out on Union Street, near the Airport Mall. I had called ahead for a cab to meet Lisa when she got in, but it never materialized, and there she was at nearly midnight, without a cell phone or a means of getting home other than her feet.

For many years, the Greyhound station in Bangor was smack dab downtown, accessible to everything. Now it’s out at Dysart’s truck stop in Hermon, five miles out of town, a situation even worse than Camden’s because it’s impossible to walk there.

At least Bangor’s local bus system, the Community Connector, has a highly visible downtown hub, between Pickering Square and the parking garage. But the waiting room is a depressing affair and closes after the buses stop running at six in the evening. And there’s no connection between the Community Connector schedule and buses arriving from out of town.

Do municipalities want their bus services to be invisible? Why? Bus stations should be in the centers of towns. Bangor needs a clean, well-lit, friendly downtown bus depot, incorporating the Greyhound, Concord Coach and Community Connector services, expandable for the day when regular passenger service to Bar Harbor and the Downeast coast becomes available. The depot should have a coffee shop and a place to buy newspapers and books. The atmosphere around the bus terminal ought to encourage ridership, rather than sending people scurrying for their cars.

In other parts of the country, I have seen some truly unfriendly bus stations. It’s an American stereotype: since the bus is supposedly full of poor people, towns do their best to hide the bus stop from drivers trying to find a place to park.

But how much of this stereotype is self-reinforcing? Many Americans have no contact with any bus service at all. They drive their cars everywhere, and the entire infrastructure is designed for them. It’s a form of privilege as pervasive as the favoritism bestowed on white heterosexual English-speaking able-bodied males (of which I am one), and equally invisible to those who enjoy it.

Thus it was gratifying to hear Bangor City Councilor Gibran Graham, at a recent budget meeting, touch on this concept. “We seem to be a privileged society in our cars,” he said. “Most of us who make decisions have these things. But people who depend on the bus have to structure their lives in order to do so.”

Public transportation is the future in our car-addled world. Friendly, convenient service is the way to get there.

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