Buses and Trains

The Bangor Community Connector, and others

Circular approach may help straighten out traffic in Orono

Hank Garfield

 

The University of Maine is getting a roundabout.

Construction has begun at the intersection of Route 2 and Rangeley Road, what I think of as the back entrance to the University. During the summer, when the bulk of the students are gone, roadwork will kick into high gear.

On May 14, Rangeley Road will be closed, forcing motorized traffic to and from the University to use College Avenue. The bus route between the University and Old Town will be disrupted. But the end result, said Community Connector compliance officer Jeremy Gray, will be a much safer intersection that’s friendlier to cars, buses and bicycles.

“The buses often have a hard time making that left turn out of the University,” Gray said. “When the roundabout is completed, it will be a lot easier for them to stay on schedule.”

The bus from Bangor leaves Pickering Square at 15 minutes past the hour on weekdays from 7:15 am to 5:15 pm. It passes through downtown Orono, crosses the Stillwater River, and bears left on College Avenue, arriving at the Memorial Union on campus at 45 minutes past the hour. The bus then exits campus via Rangeley Road, turns left on Route 2, and continues on to Old Town, before returning to the Union on the half-hour, and continuing on to Bangor. The round trip takes nearly two hours.

But during busy times of day, that left turn has been problematic. Feeding that intersection are a gas station and convenience store, a coffee shop, a bank, traffic between Orono and Old Town, and a sprawling student housing development. Buses have been hung out to dry there for ten minutes or more. The construction has only made it worse.

There will likely be delays this summer, none of them the fault of the bus or its driver. Instead of leaving campus via Rangeley Road (which will be closed), the bus will have to backtrack out to College Avenue, turn left, turn left again on Route 2, and then drive right through the construction site. Route 2 will remain open, but at times will be reduced to a single lane.

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Many Americans are unfamiliar with roundabouts. Maine has twenty-two of them. Two are in Bangor. One is in Blue Hill, my old hometown, at the top of Tenney Hill, where four routes intersect. It was the site of several terrible crashes. I used to go flying down that hill on my bicycle, without a helmet. Those days are long gone. I’m thankful I survived them.

The Maine Department of Transportation targeted the Rangeley Road intersection for a roundabout because it saw a higher-than-expected number of crashes. During a recent two-year period, there were 24 reported crashes. Most, according to the student newspaper Maine Campus, were either rear-end or T-bone collisions.

The roundabout should make things better for bicyclists, too, once drivers learn to yield the lane to them on the approach. Roundabouts are designed to slow things down. They differ from rotaries, which are larger, and are approached at an oblique angle. Roundabouts have a smaller radius and are entered at right angles. In both cases, vehicles already in the circle have the right of way.

For a bicyclist, the proper way to approach a roundabout is to “control the lane” so that an impatient driver cannot pass you on either side. Using hand signals, make sure that drivers know where you’re going. The point of a roundabout is traffic calming. Instead of trying to beat a yellow light, drivers will have to slow down, temporarily, to the speed of a bicycle. At a dangerous crossroads this is a good thing.

The project should be finished in time for the start of classes in the fall. We’ll see what happens when the students return en masse. Roundabouts take some getting used to. In some places, the number of crashes went up after a roundabout replaced a traffic light. But only initially, and the crashes were far less severe.

I hope the roundabout helps the buses run on time. I hope it makes bicycling safer on that stretch of road. I hope it encourages drivers to slow down and drive more cautiously.

But the intersection was a problem because too many people used it to drive short distances they could easily cover by bus or bicycle. Too many people own too many cars. That’s the challenge of the Late Automobile Age, and this is a roundabout way of addressing it.

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We walk, bicycle, drive, and fly by orders of magnitude

Hank Garfield

One of the things that happened when I gave up car ownership was that I began to see my surroundings in a different way. I walked more, and on the street you see faces and encounter other human beings at close range in real time. You can even stop and have a conversation. You can certainly stop and smell the roses, or look in a store window, or anything else.

Walking is slower than bicycling, which is slower than a bus, which is slower than a car, and so on. But each successive system of propulsion gives up in intimacy what it gains in speed.

On foot, you are one with the land. You can see and hear and touch it. On a bicycle, you’re faster but a little less connected. In a car, you’re in your own private room that you can direct, and on a train, you’re in a public room you can’t. In an airplane, of course, you’re not on the land at all.

You’ve probably seen a variation of the video that zooms out from a woman’s hand into the Universe and then zooms back in, all the way to sub-atomic particles in the cells of her skin. The size of the picture increases or decreases by a factor of ten, an order of magnitude.

This is a phrase often misused by math-indifferent writers, and a concept often misunderstood. An order of magnitude is a step in an exponential series: 10, 100, 1,000. Exponential growth starts slowly but gets huge in a hurry. When you read that traffic has “increased exponentially,” smile and be thankful that it hasn’t. No one would be able to move.

I first learned of magnitude from the stars. The system is an overlay of modern astronomy on a framework devised by the ancient Greeks, who classified stars by brightness. Stellar magnitudes run in reverse: the lower the number, the brighter the star. Prominent stars are first-magnitude stars. A few very bright stars have negative magnitudes. The faintest stars on the edge of visibility are magnitude 6. Anything fainter requires a telescope. Each magnitude is approximately 2.512 times brighter than the one below it.*

Have I lost you yet? What do orders of magnitude have to do with cars and transportation?

Well, I was just thinking…

The base doesn’t have to be ten. Average human walking speed is about four miles per hour. Some people walk faster or slower, of course. But that’s what we’re built with: four miles an hour.

Multiply that by four, and you get the approximate speed of a bicycle: 16 mph. It’s possible to go much faster, but hills and age and obstacles will take a big bite out of your average speed.

At 16 mph you’ll miss things you would have noticed on foot. You’ll wave at the friend on the sidewalk instead of stopping for a word or two. Traffic demands more of your attention because you are on the road instead of alongside it. You can still stop and revert to walking any time you want. But it’s an order-of-magnitude distance – small, because the numbers are still low.

But multiply by four again, and you get the speed of a car on an unencumbered roadway: 64 mph, or nine miles an hour over the speed limit, a typical operating speed for a car.

It’s another order-of-magnitude step, but a much steeper one. You’re fortified in your own private bubble, and you consider it your private space even as you move it about in public. You’re restricted to the roads and parking lots, subject to many more rules. Your interaction with the land and the people on it is limited to the places you choose to stop. You communicate with your fellow drivers through gestures, some of them friendly.

Four times 64 equals 256, or 44. Both China and Japan have developed high-speed trains capable of speeds higher than 256 mph. In service, they operate at speeds of around 200-220 mph. I’ve never traveled on a train that fast, but the experience on a train is that of an observer, as the world scrolls by.

Multiply by four again and you’ve got the Concorde: 1,024 mph. Passenger planes fall somewhere between it and the bullet train. But any kind of flying strikes me as an order of magnitude above any kind of land transportation.

Next: How orders of magnitude (should) shape traffic laws.

____________________________________________________________

* – A star of magnitude 1 is 100 times brighter than a star of magnitude 6. The number 2.512 is an approximation of the 5th root of 100, so that (2.512)5 ≅ 100. Every five magnitudes means a 100-fold difference in brightness. In this way the old Greek system is preserved, and can be extended to extremely bright or faint celestial objects.

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Big Brother boards the bus in Bangor

Hank Garfield

 

The thing that set me off last week was a report of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents boarding a Concord Coach bus in Bangor and asking passengers to prove their citizenship. I learned of it through social media, via an article by Colin Woodard on the Portland Press Herald website. A later piece appeared in the Lewiston Sun-Journal. Our local Bangor Daily News had nothing.

I ride those buses all the time, and I’ve never been asked for my papers. I do have to show a photo ID when I buy my ticket, but not to a federal agent. That sort of thing is supposed to be illegal in the United States of America, according to the fourth amendment to the constitution. If you are unfamiliar with the fourth amendment, here it is:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

But when I shared Woodard’s piece on the Slower Traffic Facebook page, several readers chimed in to support the policy. “Make America Safe Again,” one wrote, with a surfeit of exclamation points. “Great policy.”

And then there was this, also excessively punctuated: “I have nothing to hide! I’m a legal citizen. Are you?”

Now this is funny, because you can find my great-great grandfather’s bearded face on any presidential calendar in America. We even have the same last name. Though I don’t go around advertising this, my antagonist was all too ready to pronounce me guilty until proven innocent. For all he knows I could have changed it from Gonzalez, or Garibaldi.

I wondered if he would be as sanguine about getting pulled over in his car when he was doing nothing wrong, just because the police were looking for undocumented immigrants. Boarding a bus as a ticketed passenger does not constitute “probable cause” for a search of your possessions, including your wallet, any more than driving a car does.
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When I pointed this out, I was called a snowflake and told to go find a safe space. This is what the Twitter Presidency hath wrought. This is the way we communicate now. And it sucks.

The left is just as guilty of this as the right, by the way, and Slower Traffic is not and has never been a political blog. But I suppose that by its very nature, the act of giving up car ownership in early 21st century America is political. If I don’t want to see oil exploration near Penobscot Bay, the less I contribute to the demand, the better. I support spending tax dollars on public transportation and bicycle infrastructure. I’d like to bring passenger trains back to Rockland and Bangor. I advocate for policies that encourage walking neighborhoods and reflect the true cost of cars.

None of this makes me a Marxist.

But neither does support for oil drilling, or conservative policies in general, make one a bigot, racist, misogynist, Nazi, or any of the other epithets some of my friends on the left throw around far too frequently.

It seems so difficult to have a real conversation any more. Nobody thinks before they speak, and it’s all happening electronically. Instead of trying to engage each other on the challenging issues of our times, and maybe learn something in the process, we’re busy choosing up sides, and selecting the best pithy insults to throw at one another This is why I refused to use Twitter long before Trump took office, and refuse to use it still. It’s designed to engender misunderstanding and resentments. It encourages us to attribute the worst possible motives to those with whom we disagree.

Thanks to the Twit-in-Chief, it’s now acceptable for elected officials to post memes on the Internet calling their fellow Americans traitors and scumbags and pigs, and tacitly encouraging violence against journalists. Straw-man arguments abound, as both sides assume the worst about each other. I’m dismayed at how often, and how quickly, this turns into invective.

Twitter has become like the car culture. You don’t have to buy into it, but you still have to be careful not to get run over. And apparently you have to be prepared to waive your constitutional rights the minute you step on board a bus.

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