Buses and Trains

The Bangor Community Connector, and others

The Lonely Road toward better Public Transportation

Hank Garfield

I was the only passenger on the Concord Coach bus leaving Bangor at 7 one recent morning, on the scenic route along the coast.

In Belfast, where I disembarked, two passengers got on, and additional riders would board in Camden and Rockland and points farther south. But it’s weird being alone on a 57-passenger bus, with no one else but the driver. And it wasn’t the first time.

Many of the people who use this bus are traveling outside of Maine, as was the man who boarded in Belfast, headed for Boston’s South Station. But I’m still surprised at how few people think of it for more local trips. For example: how many people from Bangor attended the recent Rockland Lobster Festival? How many of them thought about doing it by bus?

During the summer, Concord runs two morning buses down the coast from Bangor, and two evening buses coming the other way. Fares are cheap, and you don’t have to worry about parking at your destination. The schedule, sad to say, doesn’t do much for a Rockland resident who wants to take a bus to the Bangor Folk Festival. There’s no way to do it without an overnight stay.

But, baby steps. The difficulty with establishing public transportation in an area where it isn’t already a way of life is akin to the “bootstraps” problem of space travel. It takes large initial investments to get off the ground, and it isn’t going to be profitable, or even popular, right away.

People see an empty bus and decry the waste of money, while cars whiz by all around them with nothing in the back seat but last week’s junk mail. Some say they would use public transportation if there were more of it: more frequent trips, later evening hours, better connections between services. I find it annoying, for instance, that the Community Connector stops running fifteen minutes before the 6 pm Concord bus from the coast gets into Bangor. I can’t get a bus back downtown.

But this isn’t about me. It’s about the world. A motor vehicle spews its weight in carbon compounds every year of its operation – and that doesn’t count the costs of manufacturing it and disposing of it. Acadia National Park is suffering under the dual automotive curse of reduced air quality and increased traffic congestion. Maine has too many cars. The United States has too many cars. The rest of the world seems all too eager to follow us on this highway to Hell.
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Given this over-abundance of exhaust-spewing vehicles, doesn’t it make sense to lure people out of their cars? Sometimes it’s better to ride a bus. If the bus is clean, reliable, and runs on a convenient schedule, why, as Concord Coach’s slogan says, would anyone drive?

I think most people drive because they are used to it, as we are used to thinking in miles, and feet, and inches. But if the United States were to join the rest of the world and adopt the metric system, it would take at most two generations for Americans to adapt. I think we also could adapt to a way of life in which the car isn’t always king.

There are small signs that this is already happening. Last month, I wrote about the new local bus service in Rockland. Since then, a similar service has begun in Belfast. As yet, there isn’t a local bus connecting the two, save for the twice-a-day Concord. But as I said, baby steps.

Were I to be Maine’s next governor, I would appoint a commissioner of public transportation, someone whose job it would be to facilitate connections between all of Maine’s bus and passenger train services, to look where new routes and schedules could be added, to make sure that Mainers and visitors can get there from here without a car. A website would enable travelers to view connections and plan trips. Eventually, the hodgepodge of public transportation services in Maine will be woven into a single, easily navigable network, like the highways are now.

When it’s easier to take a bus than it is to drive, more people will take the bus. But the bootstraps problem is real. People need to use public transportation now, when it isn’t easy, to demonstrate the demand for more and better services in the future.

The return bus that afternoon carried almost a dozen passengers beyond Belfast. At the Bangor depot, I retrieved my bicycle and pedaled down Union Street, waving to the driver of the day’s last Community Connector, headed in the other direction.

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Rockland’s got a brand new bus

Hank Garfield

Rockland’s got a new local bus system.

I used it the last time I was down there. It’s called the DASH bus, and the acronym stands for Downtown Area Shuttle. Though it doesn’t exactly dash around town, it makes possible errands without a car in the spread-out Rockland commercial area.

From 7:00 a.m. to 4:50 p.m., two buses run opposite routes on the hour between the Wal-Mart in Thomaston and Penobscot Bay Medical Center in Rockport. They often cross paths at the Custom House Place parking lot in downtown Rockland. Other stops include the ferry landing, Harbor Plaza, the Salvation Army, and the Maritime Farms convenience store on south Main Street. The bus will also stop for you along the route and let you off where you choose.

This is welcome news. It’s relatively easy to get to Rockland without a car, but less easy to get around without a car once you’re there. Residents without cars have had to use local taxis, bicycles, and their own two feet. Like many Maine cities, Rockland has favored the car by locating necessary services (like City Hall) outside the convenient reach of non-drivers.

The DASH bus is not a panacea for all the problems associated with the overuse of automobiles in mid-coast Maine, but it’s a solid start. Trains and long-distance buses can help alleviate some of the summer tourist traffic, but most of the excess use of cars comes from what traffic planners call “trip-chaining” – or in the vernacular, running errands. This is why businesses outside the immediate downtown are compelled to maintain large parking lots, free to park in, which in turn encourages more driving. But the local bus offers an alternative.

Steffanie Pyle is a community engagement facilitator with Mid-Coast Public Transportation, the Belfast-based organization that runs the bus. The DASH bus began operations in May, with little fanfare. There will be an “official grand launching” sometime in the fall, she said.

“Anecdotally, I can tell you the reception’s been good so far,” Pyle said. “We’ve had some positive feedback from riders and people in the community.”

The two buses can each carry 12 passengers and are wheelchair accessible. They’re comfortable and air-conditioned. They do not carry bike racks, but Pyle said plans are afoot to add them eventually.

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Fares are comparable to Bangor’s Community Connector. A single ride costs $2 in Rockland versus $1.50 in Bangor; a monthly pass on the DASH is $50, five dollars more than a monthly Community Connector pass. You can purchase a 12-punch card that gives you dozen rides for the price of ten; the Community Connector offers a string of six tickets for the price of five rides. But the Rockland bus service offers something Bangor doesn’t: a five-dollar day pass that allows you unlimited rides on the day you buy it. This is perfect for someone like me, in town irregularly but often, usually without a car.

I had to look up the Community Connector prices; I haven’t paid for a ride in years. The University of Maine is a pioneer in promoting public transportation. Unlike most employers, they do not provide free parking at the job site. Instead, they give away de facto bus passes, and Husson, EMCC, and Beal College have followed suit.

Could employers in the Rockland area do the same? Penobscot Bay Medical Center and Wal-Mart, the anchors of the route, employ many car commuters. If even a few of them became bus commuters instead, the roads would be a little less crowded, and drivers might be a little less inclined to treat crosswalks like yellow lights, racing to get through them ahead of pedestrians.

Like many small cities, Rockland is struggling with the transition from the Age of the Automobile to a mixed-use transportation future. Pyle described bus service in Maine as a collection of small services “all Frankensteined together – as is the funding.” Money comes from sources including federal grants, local matching funds, donations, and fares paid by riders. “The ultimate goal is to connect all these services together,” Pyle said.

I agree. It should be possible to take the Community Connector to the Concord Coach depot in Bangor, get on a bus to Rockland, meet the DASH bus at the ferry terminal, and reverse the process at the end of the day – in either direction. We’re not quite there yet. But it’s coming.

Public transportation serves older people aging out of cars, but it also helps to keep young people – the post-automotive generation – in the state and in the work force. People want human-scale, pedestrian friendly communities. Buses are a big part of that picture.

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A fine madness, at slow speed

Hank Garfield

To me, Maine is the coast. Maine is lobster boats and harbors and halyards clinking against masts. That’s the Maine I grew up in and the Maine I imagine, although I now live inland, 25 miles up the Penobscot River.

The Maine coast is closer to the equator than the pole. But it feels like we’re way up north on these long June days, which begin to brighten around 4 a.m. and don’t fully fade until after nine. A small sailboat is the quintessential slower traffic, slower than a bicycle, sometimes slower than walking. Still, you can go a long way on a long day.

The Native Americans who lived in Maine prior to the arrival of Europeans traveled up and down the river with the seasons, much as I do now for pure recreation. It’s a form of madness, really – to spend weeks preparing a boat to go slowly at great cost. But that’s not really accurate, is it? The wind is free. And you can have a whole lot of fun at five miles an hour.

This madness compels me to outfit my boat each spring for a trip from its winter home in Hampden to its summer mooring in Rockland. Sometimes the trip takes two days. It’s often convenient to stop at Fort Point State Park, where the Penobscot River becomes Penobscot Bay. There’s a dock, a good anchorage, and a lighthouse.

The fort was built by the British in 1759 during the French and Indian Wars. Signage at the park attests to the placement of forts at the mouths of Maine rivers for the purpose of keeping the Native Americans inland and disrupting their seasonal way of life. The rivers were their avenues, their thoroughfares. In the Automobile Age, they are almost forgotten as transportation arteries.

Future president James Garfield visited Bangor by steamboat in 1878, before returning by train to his home in Ohio. Yesterday’s boats and trains have given way to cars and buses and airplanes. But you can still travel the Maine Coast by water. Thousands of people do it ever year, on thousands of boats. Some are modest like mine; others are ostentatious and expensive, and a few are obnoxious overkill. The rising popularity of Maine as a destination for large cruise ships has several coastal towns grappling with issues of congestion and community character.

Rockland, the unofficial capital of Penobscot Bay, is blessed with a wide harbor and easy access to many of Maine’s best sailing grounds. It’s also ground zero for the ongoing argument over the character of the coast. Rockland remains a working port, with ferries, a Coast Guard station, a fishing dock, and some industry. Twenty years ago, there were few high-end sailboats and luxury yachts in the harbor. Now there are too many masts to count. The cruise ships want to come in greater numbers, and a private marina is seeking permission to expand its operation out into the area in front of the public landing.

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If you want dinner, though, you’d best get ashore before nine. That’s when all the downtown restaurants stop serving – even in June, on a Friday evening with the last glow of day still in the sky. Perhaps this is a vestige of the early-rising fisherman mentality, a sign that despite gentrification, Rockland is not yet cosmopolitan.

But the city has become friendlier to its non-driving residents and visitors. Signs along Main Street advise drivers that bicyclists may occupy a full lane of traffic. And there’s a new local bus, the Downtown Area Shuttle (DASH), that runs between Pen Bay Medical Center in Rockport to the Thomaston Wal-Mart, with stops at the ferry terminal and other convenient locations, five days a week, from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., year-round. Watch this blog for more on this new service.

On the Concord Coach bus back to Bangor, two days of sailing roll past the window in two hours. Why spend two days on a boat going somewhere you can drive in two hours? Madness, I tell you.

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