Buses and Trains

The Bangor Community Connector, and others

A Ballpark and a Bus Depot

Hank Garfield
The author at a recent Dodgers-Padres game in San Diego

I wish I’d kept the comment on the Bangor Daily News website about my piece last December extolling the new Bangor Transit Center. The commentator predicted that the place would be trashed within a month and turn Pickering Square into an eyesore.

Six months later, the station looks as good as the day it opened. There’s barely a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. There are, to be sure, cameras and “No Loitering” signs – and, importantly, staff presence during operating hours and periodic police attention around the clock. But the functional beauty of the station doesn’t seem forced. It works, because people want it to work.

Last month I left Maine for the first time since Covid to visit San Diego, where I spent the Eighties and Nineties raising children and following Tony Gwynn’s baseball career. In 1998 the city held a referendum on construction of a new baseball stadium for the Padres, who until then had been playing their home games in a football stadium with all the soul of a barracks.

Along with 59% of my fellow San Diegans, I voted Yes, because I thought the plan for the new park was visionary, especially for car-obsessed Southern California. Petco Park is right on the trolley line, walking distance from the waterfront, hotels, and restaurants. I finally got to see a game there this spring. The Dodgers beat the Padres, 2-1.

What do a baseball stadium and a bus station, in two cities of vastly different size at opposite ends of the country, have in common?

More than you might think. But I want to focus on two primary themes: Both ballpark and bus depot contribute toward curbing the ubiquity of the car in American transportation. And they each validate the idea that ordinary citizens can achieve real results through representative democracy.

In 1983 when I arrived in San Diego, the football Chargers ruled the sports landscape. The Padres were an afterthought, an expansion team (born 1969) that was never any good. They had to play in the Chargers’ stadium, in Mission Valley, surrounded by freeways and asphalt expanses suited to tailgating but not to a day at the ballpark. Now the Chargers are in Los Angeles, and the Padres are the only game in town. 

The newspapers and television stations were playing it up: the first visit by the Dodgers since the Padres bounced them from the playoffs last year. But I didn’t expect to see a sea of Dodger blue marching through the Gaslamp Quarter an hour before the ballgame with horns and flags and all. A railroad rivalry has evolved since the new ballpark opened. Petco Park is a short walk from the Santa Fe Depot, and hundreds of Dodger fans ride the regular Amtrak trains down from Orange County and LA to see a game, or a weekend series. That didn’t happen in Mission Valley. It was all cars.

The ballpark has transformed the Gaslamp Quarter. The hours before the game reminded me of Kenmore Square in Boston. San Diego has always been a city of neighborhoods. Now it has the neighborhood ballpark it deserves.

Bangor, despite its small size, is a hub. It’s a service center for outlying towns. Traffic arteries lead outward to become roads: Hammond Street to Hermon, Union Street to Levant, Broadway to Dover-Foxcroft, State Street to Old Town. At the center of the hub lies Pickering Square. It’s clearly the logical place for a bus depot. As I wrote in December, the central location is not only most convenient, it sends a powerful signal about the centrality of public transportation in the area.

But not everyone wanted it there. Several people with influence in the community spoke out against it. City Council meetings were packed with people on both side of the issue. The final vote was a 5-4 cliffhanger.

Nonetheless, today there is a bus station. It’s clean, warm, and well-lit, and after years as a dream and six months as reality, it’s a success story about citizen involvement. We elected people to the City Council who supported public transportation; we presented the case for a central bus station to the full Council, and a majority determined that we had the stronger argument. Isn’t that exactly how the process is supposed to work?

Not everybody in San Diego wanted the city to spend tax dollars to build a new ballpark for the Padres, either. But I would argue that it has already paid for itself several times over. It’s the centerpiece of a bustling business area that isn’t dominated by cars. That by itself is worth the price of admission. The sunset and the breeze off the bay are just bonuses.

And I’m tired of hearing about the elitist, out-of-touch “they” who purportedly control our democratic institutions. Ballpark and bus depot reveal this as a lie. Both are shining examples of what “we” citizens can do, using the mechanisms of politics.

 If I walk by the Bangor Transit Center and see a rare piece of litter, I’ll pick it up and put it in a trash can. I suspect a lot of other people who attended those meetings do the same. We may have each played a small part, but we all feel some pride of ownership. At the game in San Diego, I felt something of the same thing.

Bangor’s new bus depot

Across the Great Divide

Hank Garfield
Amtrak’s Southwest Chief in Raton, New Mexico

My previous out-of-town trip on public transportation was to Brooklin, Maine, at the end of a long peninsula about 50 miles from Bangor. My next trip was a little longer.

I hadn’t been all the way across the country on Amtrak since my kids were small and I could take one for half price and the second for free. That was in the 1990s, when I lived in San Diego and owned a car. The routes haven’t changed. I’ve changed. The young father has become a senior citizen, on his way west to visit his adult daughter.

Julian, California is a small town more than four thousand feet up in the mountains east of San Diego. It’s where my kids were babies and attended their first schools. Small towns in California aren’t all that different from small towns in Maine. Julian is as insular and isolated as Brooklin. And, like Brooklin, it’s served by public bus only on Fridays.

To cover the 3,400 miles between my home and my daughter’s, I used a combination of buses and trains, resorting to a car only at the very beginning and end of the trip. It’s a mile, give or take, from my house to the Concord Coach depot on Union Street. A bus leaves from there promptly at 7 AM every day, stops in Augusta and Portland, and arrives at South Station in Boston by 11:30. The train to Chicago leaves at 12:50. The area around the station looked bad and smelled worse. There was a lot of construction going on and no place to buy a newspaper. The news stand in the lobby had been ripped out. I finally found a Boston Globe at a store several blocks away. The train to Chicago left right on time.

All the way across the country, in fact, my trains ran on time. We left Albany more than half an hour late, but made up the time over a rainy night across New York and Ohio and got into Chicago ten minutes early. I got the full four-hour layover between trains, enjoying a leisurely lunch, a walk along Lake Michigan, and another protracted search for a newspaper. I guess people don’t read physical newspapers much anymore. A pity, since on a train a newspaper is much more useful than a computer.

Three days riding in coach is more comfortable at thirty-five than it is at sixty-five, but a train is still ten times better than a bus and twenty times better than a plane. Beds on the train are several times more expensive than coach tickets, and many of the sleeper units don’t have windows. The coach seats are nicely spaced, the trains are usually about half full, there’s a club car and an observation car, and the train makes ample stops for passengers to get out and walk around. 

A train allows you to see things you don’t see from the highway: a horse rolling on its back in a yard, the backsides of industrial parks, the extensive wetlands of central Massachusetts, flooding along the mighty Mississippi and its tributaries, the high plains of New Mexico across which Clint Eastwood drifted on horseback with his poncho and guns. There’s a stop in La Plata (rhymes with “See ya latah”), a Missouri town in the middle of nowhere, smaller than either Brooklin or Julian, where nonetheless a dozen passengers disembarked.

We arrived in Los Angeles, as in Chicago, ten minutes ahead of schedule. A recent mudslide had imperiled a section of track near San Clemente, so it was a train to Irvine, a bus to Oceanside, then back on the train to San Diego. (Amtrak comped this part of my trip, which, together with my senior discount, brought the total cost down under $200.) I got off the train in Solana Beach, dipped my feet in the Pacific, then took a local bus to Escondido and another bus up into the hills to Ramona, just twenty-two miles from Julian. My daughter met me there and drove me the rest of the way to her home in the mountains.

The return trip was a red-eye flight to Boston, the T to North Station, the Downeaster train to Portland, and good old Concord Coach back to Bangor. 

If you’re thinking about a similar trip, be sure to research the available routes in advance. Leave plenty of wiggle room to make connections. It’s not always evident how to get from one service to another – Amtrak to local bus, for example. I looked up my whole potential itinerary on line before I left Maine. Bring something to read during the inevitable waits. And don’t compare the travel times to driving or flying. You might not get there as fast, but you will arrive in a better state of mind.

The Mighty Mississippi near Fort Madison, Iowa

A Bus to Brooklin

Hank Garfield

I took a bus to Brooklin. Not Brooklyn, New York, which has hundreds of buses, but Brooklin, Maine, which has one. My challenge was to get from Bangor, where I live, to my family’s home at the end of Naskeag Point, without using a car. It CAN be done. Here’s how.

You have to get up early, and get to the Odlin Road park-and-ride lot by 5:30 on a Friday morning. The Jackson Lab bus runs five days a week, year-round. It transports employees to and from the Jackson Lab facilities in Ellsworth and Bar Harbor. But it’s also open to the general public, and they will drop you off anywhere along the route. It leaves promptly at 5:30 and seconds later hits Interstate 395 and is on its way.

To get to Brooklin, you have to take this bus to Ellsworth and get off somewhere close to downtown to meet a second bus. It runs only on Fridays, but also year-round, and serves Surry, Blue Hill, Deer Isle, Stonington, Sedgwick, and Brooklin. The cost for the whole one-way trip from Bangor is nine dollars.

Both buses are run by Downeast Transportation, based in Ellsworth. A complete schedule of their routes is available at the Bangor Transit Center, and online.

But the bus doesn’t stop at the Transit Center. I called the day before to make sure that both buses carry bicycles and to verify the schedule, and at 4:55 Friday morning, I set off by bicycle from my house in the dark. I had timed the ride a few days earlier and confirmed that I could do it in a comfortable 20-25 minutes without busting my aging butt. The sky was brightening when I wheeled into the park-and-ride. The bus was already there. I guess someone had told the driver to expect me, because she made a note on a clipboard and said she could drop me off at the Mill Mall in Ellsworth, where a short bike ride would take me to City Hall to meet the second bus.

The first bus was about half-full, about fifteen passengers. A few brought blankets. It was a quiet ride. The sun came up around quarter to six. At 6:03 I disembarked at the Mill Mall, right in front of Sylvie’s Café. “Open at 4:30 AM” said the sign in the window. I enjoyed a smashing breakfast and listened to a group of truck drivers at another table discuss various routes they took between Maine and Florida. At the lumberyard across the street, people were already moving stuff around with forklifts. The day had begun. 

My bus left at 7:20. I didn’t need a ticket or a transfer or anything. It was all very informal. I paid the cash fare in Bangor, and the driver in Ellsworth knew I was coming. Not surprising, really, since I was the only passenger.

“You do know we go to Stonington first, right?” the driver said. I replied that I did, and that I was in no hurry. It was a fine day for a scenic tour of the Blue Hill peninsula, overcast but clear. The view from Caterpillar Hill, virtually unchanged since my childhood, stretched to the horizon, the Deer Isle bridge in the foreground illuminated by a ray of sunlight.

An older woman and man got on in Stonington. They were regulars; the driver knew them by name and picked them up at their houses. He picked up another two passengers in North Deer Isle, and after a short delay for a jackknifed truck, he dropped me at the Brooklin General Store right on schedule at 9:20. I had another three miles to go, but that’s why I have a bicycle.

This may seem like a long and convoluted way to get to a destination that’s only an hour and a half away by car, but nine bucks is less than the cost of gas to get there, not to mention all the costs associated with car ownership. When my family moved to Blue Hill in my tenth year, we were called “straphangers” – people who rode buses and hung onto straps – and it was not a term of endearment. Public buses were foreign and therefore suspicious, From Away.

The bus seems to be used primarily by senior citizens on the peninsula to get to Ellsworth and back, though the driver said he sometimes picks up kids going to school. It makes a return trip in the afternoon, reversing the morning route. Thus a person could board the bus in Brooklin at 9:20, spend a few hours in Ellsworth, and be home by early afternoon. 

Though public transportation in this rural area may be skeletal, that this service exists at all is something of a minor miracle. And it is imperative that those of us who believe in the future of public transportation use what’s here in the present, however infrequent or inconvenient. It may take longer and require some planning, but it demonstrates demand, and paves the way for more and better transportation options down the road.