Maine

Bangor Takes a Few Small Steps toward Walkability

Hank Garfield
Downtown Bangor

Thanks to a handful of modest construction projects, it’s getting a little bit easier to walk around Bangor these days.

“Walkability” is a buzzword of recent vintage, coined to describe centralized towns where goods and services are as easily accessible to pedestrians as to the owners of cars. Too many American communities remain car-centered, controlled by concerns about parking and traffic flow. But there’s a new awareness in the air that walkable towns see improvements to their business climates and quality of life when they limit the places that cars can go.

Bangor has made baby steps in this direction in recent months. By making Park Street one-way to cars down the hill and adding an island at the bottom, the city has turned one of its least friendly intersections into something a pedestrian can hope to navigate at normal walking speed. Similarly, the expanded sidewalks and reduced roadway at the top of this same hill by Somerset Street have made it possible to walk and not run across that intersection. But the city missed a golden opportunity in the heart of downtown when it elected to leave West Market Square open to cars.

The redesigned partial plaza is a marked improvement over the streetscape with parking on both sides that it replaced. But it could have been better. Now that the entrance to the Pickering Square parking garage has been moved, the only vehicles on the near side of the square are the Community Connector buses that converge every half hour during the day to pick up passengers. By closing a couple of side streets to vehicles, the city could have constructed a car-free zone bounded by Main and State Streets, the bus circle, and the Kenduskeag stream.

Any town of decent size in Eastern Europe has such a central pedestrian area. Cities much smaller than Bangor manage to set aside substantial street space for people rather than cars. You will see the occasional delivery vehicle, but you don’t have to dodge traffic when walking from one business to another. And these pedestrian areas thrive. People shop and congregate there. Bangor could surely benefit from a modest version of the same thing.

Downtown Blagoevgrad

Imagine Broad Street, West Market Square, and Merchant Row all closed to cars, and Pickering Square empty of vehicles other than buses. Combined with the pedestrian bridge over the Kenduskeag Stream, this would create a central pedestrian area, still small by European standards but expandable, for all locals and visitors to Bangor to enjoy.

The problem is, of course, public perception. Eastern European towns and cities weren’t built around cars. There is no underlying assumption that everybody has one. But most Americans are accustomed to driving everywhere they need to go, and they tend to view any reduction in street capacity or parking as something taken away, rather than given. And yet, in every place it’s been tried, traffic reduction and limited automobile access has proven to be a gift that pays substantial dividends.

The point I’m trying to make is that a small initial inconvenience to drivers can be a boon to a community as a whole. Drivers get used to redirected routes, and people flock to the new pedestrian areas. Downtown businesses see an uptick in sales. It’s a win for everyone.

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Unfortunately, we take a few steps forward and a step back. The Bangor farmers market, which I’ve frequented all summer and fall, will relocate after Thanksgiving to its new winter home on Cleveland Street, way out by the airport. It’s hard enough to find locally produced food within convenient walking distance of downtown Bangor, and this move will make it harder. For the last few years, the twice-monthly indoor winter farmers market has been at the Sea Dog restaurant, steps from the heart of downtown.

The new location isn’t walkable from anywhere. (I have the same problem with the Natural Living Center, way out on Stillwater Avenue. Everybody who shops there has to drive – as if “natural living” meant getting into a two-ton vehicle to haul a few pounds of organic vegetables.)

It’s too bad that the farmers market couldn’t find a more convenient place for its winter incarnation. I’ll miss it. But I’ll be back next season on Sundays when, for a few hours, a downtown parking lot gets put to better use.

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A Study in Lollygagging

Hank Garfield

It was heartening to see some sixty citizens at the September 23 meeting on the latest study of Bangor’s public transit system. The study, by Stantec Consulting Services, an international firm based in Edmonton, Alberta, took a comprehensive look at the Community Connector bus system and how it can best serve the greater Bangor area. The meeting took place at City Hall, and ended after the bus service closed down for the evening.

Though the majority of us were there to show support for expanded bus service, it was disheartening to hear a few old and discredited attitudes persist this late into the discussion.

Bangor’s Pickering Square is the hub of a wheel that radiates major streets outward into Bangor and the surrounding towns. It is the natural and most logical location for the center of the bus system. There is no better use for this downtown space. The buses are visible, accessible and dependable. The hub of the system needs to be at the hub of the city, and talk of moving it should be over.

So should unrealistic expectations of cost-effectiveness. No transportation system pays for itself. This is true of private cars as well buses and trains. Taxpayers don’t demand a per-user accounting of the costs of roads, parking lots, left-turn pockets, enforcement of traffic laws, and the host of other expenses associated with the American car culture. Public transportation is a public service, akin to libraries, schools, police and fire departments. It benefits users and non-users alike. It makes a community better.

Evening hours are an absolute necessity. We’ve been talking about this since at least 2007, when I began riding the bus. In that time, two parking garages have gone up, both of them smack dab along bus routes. This encourages driving and discourages use of the bus, at a time when public policy should be leaning hard in the opposite direction.

The Community Connector has been slowly losing passengers. Anecdotally, it’s easy to see why. I’ve lost count of how many people have told me that they don’t ride the bus to work in the morning because they can’t get home in the evening. Portland’s bus system, which does have evening hours, is thriving.

It is an incontrovertible fact that every dollar spent on public transportation injects four dollars into the economy. When people can get to their jobs without a vehicle, they have more money to spend at local businesses. Less parking is required, freeing funds to be used for more essential services. Traffic congestion eases, creating more time and less stress for everyone.

 So why does it take a year to put up a parking garage, and more than a decade and counting to get evening bus hours? As one citizen at the meeting pointed out, a study is just words and graphs on paper until it is put into action. At what point do we stop funding studies and start investing in actual on-the-ground improvements?

I’m a believer in incremental rather than revolutionary change. I understand that municipalities must be fiscally responsible. But the need for evening bus hours is obvious and overdue. If the city of Bangor can spend $100,000 on a study, it can find the money to expand the hours of service, sooner rather than later. Even extending service by two hours would make a huge difference. People could run errands after work and still take the bus home. Passengers arriving by Concord Coach at six in the evening would no longer be hung out to dry on outer Union Street. Businesses all along the route would benefit.

But some business owners still see the bus system as a nuisance. One man at the meeting complained that the bus stop in front of his business was frequently littered with empty coffee cups and discarded cigarette butts. I don’t like littering, at bus stops or anywhere else, but it’s unfair to blame the bus for people’s bad habits. And he failed to note that the bus also delivers potential customers to his business every half hour during each weekday, with no additional demand for parking.

Attitudes are slow to change. But change they must. Twentieth-century traffic policies that encouraged driving and near-universal car ownership will no longer work in an era of finite fossil fuels, environmental awareness, and inefficient sprawl. Small cities like Bangor can lead the way forward, by investing in real improvements to public transportation now, before the public loses patience with more studies and meetings. Extending bus hours into the evening is a good place to start.

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“Why Don’t You Just Drive?”

Hank Garfield

I sing the praises of the Concord Coach bus system. It gets me from Bangor to Rockland and back at times of day that suit my schedule. The bus trip takes only a few minutes longer than the drive. And the price — $36 round trip – is reasonable.

Every day at 7 a.m., and also at 11 a.m. in the summer, two buses leave the Concord Coach station on Union Street in Bangor. One is the express to Portland and Boston, with a single stop in Augusta. The other is the coastal route, which serves Rockland and several other towns. The express is often packed and never less than half-full. As I write this, I’ve just left Bangor on the 11 o’clock coastal bus with three other passengers.

The bus always picks up more passengers in Belfast, Camden, and at stops in Rockland and beyond. Most of them are bound for Portland or Boston, like their counterparts who boarded the express in Bangor. But I often wonder why this part of the route is so thinly used. Why don’t more Bangorians visit the midcoast by bus?

I think it’s because they don’t think about it. Or if they do, driving seems more straightforward and cost-effective. We are conditioned to think this way by the car culture we all grew up in, and the economic decisions we make reflect those values.

But we Americans live in a rigged market, where every incentive favors driving. It’s not this way everywhere, as I learned during my time in Bulgaria.

The driving distance between Bangor and Rockland is 63 miles. The driving distance between Blagoevgrad and Sofia is 105 kilometers, or 65 miles – the same, for the purpose of the rough comparison I will do here. The time it takes to drive is likewise similar.

A bus ticket from Bangor to Rockland costs $18 if you buy a round-trip ticket; the one-way fare is $20. The return ticket is good for a year. A ticket from Blagoevgrad to Sofia is 10 leva, or about $6, with no open-ended round-trip discount. The price of gas in Maine is currently around $2.50 per gallon. The price of gas in Bulgaria is about 2.2 leva per liter, or about $4.70 (in U.S. dollars) per U.S. gallon.

Let’s say you own a car that gets 25 miles per gallon. A driver in Bangor is going to spend six dollars for the gas to get to Rockland. (Of course, there are other expenses to driving, but that average American car owner, who is already absorbing those costs, thinks primarily about the cost of gas.) A driver in Bulgaria will spend the equivalent of around $11 to drive the same distance.

In Maine, the bus ticket costs three times the price of the gas to drive the same route. In Bulgaria, the gas costs twice as much as the bus ticket. So the average American weighs the costs and says, “I’ll just drive,” while the average Bulgarian makes the opposite choice. It helps, too, that the Bulgarian buses run every hour rather than just twice a day.

I can also tell you that in both Sofia and Blagoevgrad the bus station is right next to the train station. It’s easy to transition from one form of transportation to another. The Concord Coach station in Bangor is close to the airport, but not walkable, and there’s no regularly scheduled shuttle. It requires a cab. And the local Community Connector bus system stops running fifteen minutes before the evening buses from Rockland and Boston pull in, leaving passengers hung out to dry. The Greyhound stop, over the horizon in Hermon, is even worse.

The Rockland bus station is at the ferry terminal, in the center of town. But most of the Concord Coach stops aren’t nearly as accessible. The stop for Camden, for example, is at a convenience store (convenient for drivers) two miles out of town.  It’s one of the least friendly bus stops I’ve ever seen. The store is often closed when the bus arrives. One can only take from this that Camden doesn’t want, or at best, doesn’t care about, visitors who arrive by bus.

Obviously, the smart thing to do would be to raise gas taxes and put the money into improved and expanded public transportation. But it’s a tough sell in a rigged market. Even American liberals, who express concern about climate change and environmental degradation and sprawl, become protective of their car culture when it impacts their daily lives. Why shouldn’t they? It’s all they’ve ever known.

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