Maine

Why Universities Charge You to Park

Hank Garfield

Last week I got into a Facebook argument with someone I consider a friend, about parking at the University of Maine. I hate on-line arguments. The nature of social media encourages pithy, cut-and-run comments, and I made one along the lines of: “The University provides free bus service, so quit whining about parking.”

Full disclosure: since 2007, I have worked as an adjunct professor of English at said university, and, as regular readers know, for the same period of time I have not owned a car. I’ve never paid for a parking permit. I can count the number of times I’ve driven to campus on the fingers of both hands and still have fingers left over to pull out my bus pass. But my comment was rude, and I’m sorry I succumbed to the temptation of posting it.

My friend’s opinion was that the University (and universities in general) charge their students too much in tuition and fees as is, and that paid parking is an added burden on already stressed budgets.

I’m going to try to be nice. I can empathize with someone working a low-paying job, just trying to make ends meet. I’ve been there. Fifty dollars a year can seem like a lot in those circumstances.

But the ongoing proliferation of cars is a threat to the global ecosystem. As leaders in scientific research, educational institutions have a special responsibility to lead the way out of the Late Automobile Age into a more benign and sustainable future. The University of Maine has been nationally recognized for its green initiatives. One of them is the program that provides free access to the local bus system for all students, faculty and employees.

Because we’ve spent the seven-plus decades since the Second World War building up car infrastructure and tearing down public transportation, many Americans, including those who attend and work at universities, have structured their lives around a culture of car ownership as necessity. We live in outlying towns and drive to malls and movies and supermarkets, and most of us drive to work. It’s a habit that’s hard to break.

The University of Maine’s approach is part carrot and part stick. The carrot is free transportation anywhere within the Community Connector bus system, an area stretching from Old Town to Hampden and across the Penobscot River to Brewer. The stick is a $50 annual parking fee, and a few restrictions on who can park where at what times.

But this doesn’t work for everyone. Evening students, employees with small children, long-distance commuters and others will still drive, and will continue to complain about paying to park. But even they reap the benefits. Every time someone decides to take the bus instead of drive, it frees up a parking space that would otherwise be occupied. The University of Maine does not have a problem of not enough parking. The University’s problem – shared with schools around the country and the world – is that too many people still want to drive.

Increased parking fees might persuade more people to ride the bus. But that approach will engender even more ill will from people stuck in a car culture they didn’t create. I would rather advocate for the carrot of extended bus hours.

Decades of advertising and infrastructure design have done their damage. Parking lots dominate campuses and suburbs, and still the public cries for more. Driving and car ownership are still seen as ubiquitous requirements, not just in America, but all over the world. A recent surge in gas prices brought Bulgarians out of their cars in anger, blocking roads and disrupting commerce all over the country.

Why should parking at your place of work be free? One might argue that most people have to drive to their jobs – but most people have to eat lunch, too, and few companies feed their employees for free in the middle of the day. If you bring your lunch, you can save money by not buying food at the company cafeteria. The same should be true of coming to work without a car – an incentive not to drive.

Indeed, a few employers offer “parking offsets” – small stipends in the paychecks of workers who don’t park at work. In practice, it amounts to the same thing as saving the $50 on the parking fee, but the employee perceives it as a reward rather than an expense.

Attitudes change slowly, but they do change. The long, slow work of undoing the damage wrought by the over-proliferation of automobiles is underway, in Orono and other university towns, one parking permit and one free bus ride at a time.

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My Baseball Back Pages

Hank Garfield

Fans of my transportation pieces and followers of my Bulgarian sojourn will have to forgive me for writing about baseball again so soon. And I will have to forgive myself for being overseas during the most compelling World Series of my lifetime.

Red Sox-Dodgers: it doesn’t get any better than this.

My earliest memories of baseball fandom are of being a severely left-handed little kid, in an elementary school with many Jewish classmates, at a time when Sandy Koufax was the best pitcher on the planet. I didn’t see much baseball on TV, but I did watch the last game he ever pitched, when the Dodgers made six errors behind him and lost in the World Series to the Baltimore Orioles.

Koufax was to Jews what Muhammad Ali was to black Americans. He is also one of only two ballplayers (Babe Ruth is the other) whose name has become an adjective. When a pitcher is particularly unhittable, we say that he is “Koufaxian.” More than fifty years after his sudden and premature retirement, he remains the gold standard by which pitchers are measured.

The next year we moved to Maine, just in time for the Impossible Dream, the wild, multi-team pennant race won by the Red Sox on the last day of the season. I’ve been a Red Sox fan ever since.

For the first forty-two years of my life, the Dodgers had exactly two managers: Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda. They were, of course, the first team to integrate (the Red Sox were the last). And they always had great starting pitching, from Koufax and Drysdale to Valenzuela and Hershiser, and now, Clayton Kershaw. They won 1-0 games with an infield hit, a stolen base, a bunt and a sacrifice fly, backed by a complete-game shutout from their ace of the moment.

Dave Roberts, the current Dodger manager, will deservedly get a lot of love from the Fenway crowd for The Stolen Base Heard ‘Round the World in 2004. It’s the single most important baseball moment in the new millennium. For, like the first piece of concrete chiseled from the Berlin Wall, it was the first blow in bringing down an evil empire.

But Roberts lost me as a manager when he pulled a rookie pitcher from his first game with a no-hitter in progress. It’s never been done before: a no-hitter in a major league pitcher’s first game. In 1967, a Red Sox lefty named Billy Rohr came within one strike. Dick Williams, his manager, not only left him in the game until he gave up a hit with two out in the ninth, he let him retire the next batter to complete the shutout. I can’t even remember the name of the kid whom Roberts denied a shot at history. It’s a shame and a travesty.

If Roberts had been managing the Yankees in 1956, he would have pulled Don Larsen after six perfect innings, and cobbled together the last nine outs with four relievers.

So it will be poetic justice if Kershaw pitches six or seven brilliant innings, and then the Red Sox jump all over the bullpen.

Then again, the Red Sox have looked like the best team in baseball all year long. Unlike the Yankees, who lived and died by the long ball, the Red Sox hit singles and doubles and triples, ran the bases, and got production from the whole lineup. Their worst hitter in April and May, Jackie Bradley Jr., was the star of the American League championship series. Even the substitutes contributed.

The Red Sox have always had great outfields: Yaz, Reggie Smith and Conigliaro; Rice, Lynn and Evans. But the current trio of Andrew Benintendi, Bradley, and Mookie Betts may be the best of them all. This may, in fact, be the best Red Sox team I’ve ever seen. Since blowing the first game of the season, as I watched with increasing disgust in Paddy Murphy’s Pub in Bangor, Maine, some seven months ago, they’ve won 115 times.

Though television has done its best to ruin the World Series, by shoehorning what should be America’s premier sporting event around the college and professional football schedules, I’m still sorry I won’t be able to watch. But I’ll be keeping close tabs on events at Fenway Park, where I saw my first big-league ballgame, and Dodger Stadium, where my two children saw theirs.

When I feel bleak about the world and my country, I’m grateful for the balm of baseball, the made-in-America game that’s still the best team sport ever invented.

And go Sox.

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Why is it always about parking?

Hank Garfield

Maine has been a destination for tourists since before I was born. And no, I wasn’t born in Maine, but it was a near thing – my parents raced back to Philadelphia from their summer home in Deer Isle on Labor Day weekend, and I came into this world two days later.

Ten years would pass before we made Maine our year-round residence, and, though there have been extended absences in the Midwest and in California and currently, in Eastern Europe, Maine has remained the place I call Home ever since. It’s where I vote and pay taxes, and it’s the place I’ll go all Greenpeace over if the government ever opens up the north Atlantic seaboard to oil exploration. For what makes Maine special is its coast, one of the most beautiful places in the world.

But the coast is now in danger of being loved to death by people in cars. We can’t blame the tourists either, or the summer people, or the transplants like me, or more recent arrivals. Check out the license plates on a summer weekend in Portland, Bar Harbor and Stonington, and you will see that much of Maine summer traffic is homegrown.

I don’t choose those three communities randomly. They were the focus of a recent piece in the Working Waterfront, the monthly newspaper published by the Island Institute. The point of the story, written by Tom Walsh, is that Maine coastal towns and cities of all sizes are plagued by seasonal parking problems, and are struggling to come up with solutions.

Too many of those proposed solutions, though, focus on the availability of parking rather than the surplus of cars. Bar Harbor is contemplating a parking garage. Stonington is looking at buying up old houses as they come up for sale and razing them. Portland, served by Amtrak and an airport, wants more parking for all the short-term visitors who come to the city by car.

The problem with these proposals is that they encourage more people to drive. The late Jane Holtz Kay, author of Asphalt Nation, wrote of the phenomenon of “generated traffic.” Build a new highway, and it will soon fill up with additional drivers wanting to use it. A clear illustration of this is Interstate 495, built as a bypass around Boston traffic congestion, and now a congested mess in its own right.

The same is true of parking lots and parking garages. When people hear that there’s a new parking garage in Bar Harbor, they will think that the parking problems have been alleviated, and they will get in their cars and drive there, filling up the garage and leaving the town to look for still more parking.

Stonington in my youth was a working waterfront backed by houses where working people lived, built atop several levels of granite ledge. It’s the prettiest town in Maine when seen from its proper vantage point – a boat on the water. What will it look like when that view is pockmarked by parking lots?

Maine’s coast offers alternatives to the automobile, if we only use a little bit of imagination. Before the construction of the Deer Isle Bridge in 1939, you couldn’t drive to Stonington. I like to go there in the summer, but I hardly ever drive. From Rockland, you can get to Stonington by boat in a few hours.

 Maine’s unbridged islands are served by out-and-back ferries. Why can’t we have a ferry service running alongthe coast – one that starts in Portland and touches at Rockland and Stonington on its way to Mount Desert Island? Why can’t Deer Isle start its own version of the Island Explorer bus service? Why can’t we get going on a light-rail system linking Bangor with Bar Harbor?

Walsh uses the word “inherent” to describe what he calls the tsunami of summer traffic in Acadia National Park. But there’s nothing inherent about it. There is no reason that Park Loop Road should be open to private cars. It would be a much more pleasant experience for all if the road were restricted to buses, bicyclists, and pedestrians. Indeed, the system of carriage roads in the park was built for the purpose of keeping cars out.

The greatest transportation challenge of the 21stcentury will be to get people out of their cars. It will take creative solutions that address the real issue, which is not how to accommodate more and more cars, but how to reduce their number. The Maine Coast is a good place to start.

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