Maine

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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Seize the day – and the lane

Hank Garfield

Spring in Maine gets here so grudgingly that it’s a revelation when it finally arrives in full force. Leaves explode onto branches, birds and squirrels fight for food outside the window, and bicyclists once again spin down the streets in significant numbers.

This time of year, I frequently bicycle between downtown Bangor and Hamlin’s Marina in Hampden, where my sailboat spends the winter. There’s a lot to do on a boat in the spring to get it ready for the water. Since I don’t have the luxury of owning a car, and since the parsimonious Hampden town council canceled Saturday bus service, my bicycle often becomes a necessary mode of transport.

It’s a pleasant ride along the Penobscot River, but there is one particular point of peril: the intersection of Route 1A (Main Street) with Interstate 395, just south of the Cross Center. A broad bridge carries the interstate over the street. Swallowed by the bridge’s shadow, a bicyclist can be hard for a driver to see.

Many Maine drivers also seem to be unaware of the law that allows a bicyclist to occupy a full lane of traffic, or “seize the lane,” in popular parlance, at this type of intersection. I’ve been honked at here a handful of times already this spring, and yelled at once. But seizing the lane is not only the safest option for the bicyclist, it’s the logical and legal thing to do. If you’re in a car and you try to pass, and a cop sees you doing it, you can be ticketed.

As I pass the Cross Center heading south, the road widens into two lanes. The right lane curls onto Interstate 395; there’s an on-ramp for each direction on either side of the bridge. The left lane continues straight on toward Hampden. That’s where I’m going. I can’t be way over to the right, because I’d get cut off by the cars turning onto the freeway. And I can’t be on the right-hand side of the left lane, for fear of getting sandwiched between two cars trying to pass me on either side – a scary place to be. Cars have to give bicyclists a minimum berth of three feet, and there isn’t room on the road to do it safely on both sides.

Consequently, the proper place for a bicyclist to be in this situation is smack dab in the center of the left lane. And the proper thing for drivers in the left lane to do is to wait to pass until the bicyclist has cleared the intersection. Most of us will be polite and pull to the right once it is safe to do so.

“Polite is not always safe,” says Lauri Boxer-Macomber, an attorney with Kelly, Remmel & Zimmerman of Portland, and a member of the national Bike Law network of lawyers who are legal advocates for cyclists. “If a bicyclist tries to make it so that cars can squeeze by, the bicyclist could be making it more dangerous for everyone. Drivers sometimes see that as the bicyclist being rude. But aggressively seizing the lane is often the safest option.”

Yes, it requires drivers behind a bicyclist to slow down. But it doesn’t take long. It adds seconds, not minutes, to the drive – a small price for safety on our public roads.

The Late Automobile Age in which we now live has seen an upturn in bicycling among people of all ages. Don’t expect that trend to change anytime in the near future. As the ravages of our rampant car culture become more apparent, many Americans have rediscovered the use of bicycles for personal transportation. A bicycle is cheaper than a car, it’s better for your health, and over short distances it can actually save you time.

The proliferation of bicycles keeps the roads safer for everyone. It reduces the overall number of cars. But perhaps more importantly, bicycles calm traffic simply by their presence. Drivers are more aware of bicyclists when they see more people on bikes, and adjust their driving behavior accordingly. They slow down.

We could all stand to slow down a little. If you’re driving somewhere in a car this summer in this beautiful state we call home, seize the day. But let bicyclists seize the lane.

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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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