I spent the week of spring break exploring some of the country I’ve called home for the past seven months. Bulgaria is beautiful. It has craggy snow-capped mountains, rolling wooded hills, historic cities, expanses of agricultural land, and a seacoast. I dipped my feet in the Black Sea, though it was too cold in March to swim.

There’s a narrow-gauge rail line that runs through the mountains southeast of Blagoevgrad. The train ride is slow and scenic. My friend Tom, an American who’s lived here for years but had never ridden this train, offered to accompany me, and also offered to drive to the train station in Bansko, about 50 kilometers from Blagoevgrad.

He later said that if he had thought it through, he would have left his car at home and joined me on the bus from Blagoevgrad to Bansko, which would have gotten us there in plenty of time for the train. But it’s hard to shake the American mindset of driving as the first, best option. More on this later.

Tom’s plan was to accompany me as far as Plovdiv, and then take a bus back to Bansko the next day to pick up his car, while I continued my trip to the Black Sea coast. We changed to a regular train in the town of Septemvri, and arrived in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second-largest city, in time to check in to a hotel and see the sun set over the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre. He told me about a place on the Black Sea called Nessebar, an old fortress built on a peninsula that is now a tourist resort. He suggested that March might be a good time to see it, as it would be uncrowded. The next day he went back to Blagoevgrad, and the day after that, I boarded a bus bound for the coast.

One remarkable thing about Bulgaria is that you can take a bus just about anywhere. The major cities are connected by rail, but even the most rural towns have regular bus service. The buses are more modern than the trains. Several bus companies run routes all over the country and into the neighboring countries. It’s easy to get from place to place without a car.

I spent a night and a day in Nessebar, walking the narrow stone streets and looking at the boats, most of which were not yet in the water. Most of the restaurants were not yet open for the season, but people were out in the sun, working on both boats and land properties. It reminded me of a tourist town in Maine stretching its arms after a long winter slumber.

At four in the afternoon, I took a bus back to Burgas, the port city on the Black Sea. There, I walked the beach, took in a public art exhibit called “Fishlove” (which featured photos of naked people posing with fish), had dinner, and boarded an overnight train to Sofia. A bus to Blagoevgrad left an hour after the train pulled in, and by nine o’clock Friday morning, I was back in my apartment drinking coffee.

The entire trip, back from a small town on the coast to a mid-sized city on the opposite side of the country, cost me 40 leva, or about $24. And it got me to thinking that if you can be a tourist in Bulgaria without a car, why can’t you do it in Maine? Instead of building parking lots, why can’t tourist towns like Stonington and Port Clyde and Southwest Harbor have daily bus service, even in the off-season? These are small towns, but so is Nessebar. And yet there’s an hourly bus to Burgas, with stops in a series of small towns, and people use it.

I talked with a few of my students about the American car-first mentality, and I observed that in Bulgaria it isn’t unusual not to own a car. The societal pressure to own one doesn’t seem to exist. But they said it does in Sofia, which, despite a modern subway system built in the last ten years, is choked with cars.

That’s a shame, because one of the worst things America has exported to the rest of the world is the idea of driving as a way of life. Maine does not have comprehensive public transportation, because most public officials own cars, and they consider the cost of bus service before the convenience. I’d like to invite them to Bulgaria and let them see that it can be otherwise.

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When you live in Europe, you meet people from all over the world. One night in early January, I found myself in a bar in Athens, talking with a Frenchman and a Quebec Canadian, both of whom worked in Luxembourg. I tried my high school French on them, and though they complimented me on my pronunciation, we soon switched back to English, the lingua franca of most such international encounters.

We got to talking about traffic, and they told me that Luxembourg’s population swells by as much as a third during the work day. Huge numbers of people commute to work in the country’s financial centers from their homes in neighboring France, Belgium and Germany.

The only thing I knew about Luxembourg is that it’s small, and one of only two countries in the world with the letter “x” in its name. (The other one borders the United States.) But I learned that Luxembourg is a thriving business hub, and that cross-border commuters make up a sizable percentage of its work force.

This, of course, is a recipe for traffic congestion. Writing for BBC Capital earlier this year, Marc Auxenfants, a reporter at the Luxembourg Times, notes that Luxembourg has the highest number of passenger vehicles per capita in the European Union, and that more than 60 percent of commuters use their cars to get to work.  It sounds like a typical American urban area.

The Luxembourg government hopes that offering free public transport, beginning in March 2020, will entice people out of their cars, even if for some of them it means a slightly longer commute. How many American drivers eschew public transportation because it takes longer than driving? My friends in Boston complain that driving is slow but public transport is slower. They may be right. But you can read on a train, and trains are better for the environment and your frame of mind.

But traffic and pollution are secondary and tertiary reasons for initiating free public transportation. The primary reason, Auxenfants notes, is social: reducing the income inequality gap between rich and poor.

Like many Americans, I owned a car for much of my adult life, because I saw it as a necessity for getting to and from work. But I was spending a good chunk of my pay on all the costs of keeping a car: the price of the car itself, plus gas, insurance, repairs, maintenance and little incidental costs that seemed to come up when I could least afford them. Since parking is largely subsidized in America, I rarely had to pay to park, but cities and towns have to tax their driving and non-driving citizens alike to cover it. It was only when I gave up car ownership that I realized how much money my car had been siphoning from my earnings.

The government of Luxembourg has rightly concluded that if lower income workers could give up their cars, they would have more money in the bank at the end of the month. They would have more money to spend on more beneficial consumer goods, and the entire economy would improve.

Luxembourg is one of Europe’s wealthier countries. But Portugal, one of the continent’s poorest, has recently embarked on a similar approach: boosting public transportation, especially in rural areas, where car ownership draws a stark line between rich and poor. And they are already seeing tangible improvements in their overall economy.

Americans tend to look at public transportation as a subsidy, sucking tax dollars from the car-owning majority to pay for a service widely seen as inconvenient and inconsistent. But public transportation is more akin to an investment, like Internet service and cell phone coverage. If you spread it to outlying areas and make it affordable, or even free, the return on the investment will be realized rather quickly.

But public transportation remains a tough sell, on both sides of the Atlantic, as Auxenfants notes near the end of his report. Liberals in the U.S, who may be all for solar power and clean energy and good environmental stewardship, seem to have a blind spot when it comes to cars. Electric cars won’t combat climate change if the electricity to run them comes from coal plants. Good, solid, scientific reasons abound for reducing the worldwide vehicle fleet. But from the perspective of the individual car owner, the economic case being made in Luxembourg and Portugal may be more compelling.

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