Maine

All My Uber Trials

Hank Garfield

Why do people think Uber is simple to use and the public bus system is complicated?

It’s exactly the opposite.

Recently, I decided to up my car non-ownership game and sign up for Uber. I’ve had great success living in Bangor, Maine for the past 17 years without owning a car. I sing the praises of the Community Connector bus system. I rejoiced with my fellow riders when the downtown Bangor Area Transit Center opened in December 2022. But the buses run only during the day, and they can’t go everywhere. It’s tough to get a taxi in Bangor, for whatever reasons. So, I thought I’d give Uber a shot.

I downloaded the app onto my smartphone, no problem. I was a bit surprised that it didn’t ask for my credit card information. Friends assured me that I would be asked to enter it the first time I used the service. After that, they said, the service would be seamless.

I wasn’t at home the first time I needed a ride. I rarely need rides from home, as I live within walking distance of town and the Transit Center. I lined up a ride, and sure enough, the app asked for my credit card info, which I dutifully plugged in. But then it wanted to send two micro-payments to my credit card. I was to report the exact amounts of the payments for verification. The only problem was that I don’t do banking on my cell phone, and I was miles from my laptop.

Fine, I thought. The next time, I would schedule the ride in advance, from home, where I could access my credit card account. (None of these steps were spelled out in advance.) However, the first two times I tried this, I got a message: “pickup location unavailable.” I have yet to take my first ride.

All this is preamble to an observation that gets more and more cemented in my psyche with each passing day.

When I posted the first two sentences of this piece on Facebook, my friend Félix, who lives in Bulgaria, replied (and I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting him here): “the public bus system is a public service and Uber is a twisted organization that tries to make their greed and consumerist anxiety look like sociality and coolness.”

As the Brits say, spot on.

I was trying to help Lisa get to and from a business on the other side of town. After striking out with Uber, I walked to the Transit Center, where a dispatcher (whose name I don’t know but who deserves praise) helped me plan the most convenient route. The bus driver was also helpful, showing us where we would need to be, and at what time, for the return trip.

There is no one to call at Uber for such assistance. And this is par for the course when a private company tries to masquerade as public service. When was the last time you called any private enterprise and did not have to navigate a series of automated prompts before connecting with a human being?

The bus system isn’t perfect. It needs longer hours. Paying passengers taking multiple rides in one day can’t use the transfer system for brief stops. Still, I hate to criticize it, because despite its imposed limitations, it works well. Anybody who can read a printed schedule can use it, and it’s inexpensive and reliable.

The great lie of the post-Reagan era is that the private sector is more efficient than the public. The focus of public services is convenience for the end-user. The focus of private enterprise is convenience (and profit) for the owners of the business. This is happening across society. To see a doctor, you used to make an appointment and show up. Now you must navigate a maze of pre-registration, pre-pre-registration, on-line verification, and electronic confirmation. To get a cup of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, you have to “interface” with a touch-screen menu when the guy who’s going to pour your coffee is standing right there, getting an order ready for the drive-thru. And don’t get me started on self-checkout at the grocery store.

More and more, the end-user (the customer) is required to navigate steps in the service process that should be handled by competent, knowledgeable staff. Rather than hire and train and pay employees, companies are increasingly putting the customer last, by making them take on more of the tasks they are supposedly paying for.

Don’t get me wrong: business does many wonderful things. But public services, like education, health care, and especially public transportation, aren’t among them.

Green Means More Than Grasping at Straws

Hank Garfield

A silly meme on Facebook – a paper straw in a plastic wrapper titled “The Green movement in a nutshell” – got me thinking about my own environmentalist leanings, and my commitment to not owning a car.

Growing up on the Maine Coast gave me an environmental consciousness I never thought of as political. I instinctively pick up trash and recoil at litter, much of which includes non-recyclable plastic. But while a ton of straws can break a camel’s back, we aren’t going to save the planet by focusing on minutiae like straws. 

What do straws have to do with cars? They both kill turtles, for one thing. But cars do a whole lot more damage than that. Aside from the thousands of people killed yearly in crashes, motor vehicles contribute to a long laundry list of insults to the global ecosystem. They burn finite fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases. They necessitate the construction of acres of parking lots, which radiate heat back into the atmosphere, eliminate wetlands, and pollute reservoirs with run-off. They encourage the development of car-centric suburbs with huge per-capita carbon footprints. They foster graveyards of spent tires and dead vehicles that continue to pollute years after they stop moving.

Although I consider myself an environmentalist, I stopped owning cars for none of those reasons. I stopped owning cars because they cost too much money. I resented the idea that I needed a car at my service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There are plenty of cars around. Surely I could find one to use when I needed to, without the economic onus of owning one.

The past 17 years have vindicated this conviction. I now have a savings account instead of a monthly car payment and an ongoing insurance policy. I don’t waste precious minutes of my life sitting in traffic jams. On foot, on a bicycle, or on a bus, I’m healthier and happier than I would be seething and swearing at people from behind a windshield.

It hasn’t come without cost, or without compromises. I have had to adjust my lifestyle and change some habits. I leave ample time to get to the places I need to go, and I sometimes don’t get to other places I want to go. For most of those years, I’ve lived with someone who owned a car. Four months ago, we became a no-car household.

So far, we’ve managed. We did not visit family for Thanksgiving, and we have not yet needed to take the dog to the vet. Have you ever noticed that almost all veterinarians are way out on the edge of town? In October we rented a car and the three of us went to the coast for a weekend, but we can’t jump up and do that on the spur of the moment.

It isn’t only veterinarians. Hardware stores are hard to find anywhere outside of Lowe’s and Home Depot, always built where it’s hard to get to other than by car. The buses stop running before many people get out of work. To live without a car in a small city like Bangor, far from any major metropolitan center, is to endure a multitude of inconveniences.

Are the inconveniences worth the rewards? In my case, the answer was, and is still, “Yes.” But I don’t need a car to get to and from my primary job, and I do much of it on-line. It’s a 15-minute walk to downtown and an even shorter walk to a corner convenience store. Renting a car works out to about a hundred dollars a day, which seems like a lot until you consider that the average annual cost of owning a car is $10,000, equal to 100 car rentals.

I’m lucky, in that I can choose not to own a car. Many don’t have that choice. They either can’t afford one, or can’t drive one, for physical or other reasons. Life is even more inconvenient for them.

Cars are a convenience, and an environmental disaster. Hence the conundrum: how does an environmentally responsible citizen retain the convenience while reducing the harm? Many people are choosing to go electric.

Electric cars are marginally better for the environment, as this article from the New York Times details. But they require lithium and cobalt mining, which aren’t any kinder to the planet than oil rigs and refineries. They will not stop suburban sprawl or the hollowing out of small business districts in favor of outlying big-box stores with massive parking lots.

If we are to be serious about our stewardship of the planet, as I believe we must be, then we can do better than to substitute one environmental disaster for a slightly lesser one. Electric cars won’t do a whole lot of good if we use them the way we use gas-powered cars now.

Instead, we can invest in comprehensive public transportation, promote pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods with a mixture of business and residential use, and incentivize development on a human rather than an automotive scale.

Why do you get a straw when you order a glass of water at a bar, anyway? You can drink it just fine without one. Owning a car should not be a necessity. Entrenched interests make it feel like one. We must work toward a world in which alternative choices are equally appealing.

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