Maine

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

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.

Snow Day

Hank Garfield
The Bus must go through.

23 January 2023

Snow Day. Schools closed, government buildings closed, along with a lot of restaurants, bars and retail businesses. Cars buried in driveways, streets unplowed. My dentist’s office called early. Several appointments had opened up before my scheduled afternoon time. 

A quick Internet check confirmed that the Community Connector buses were running. I pulled on my boots and trudged down to the new, indoor, heated Transit Center, got on a warm bus and rode it out Stillwater Avenue and disembarked half a block away. Soon, I was reclining in the chair, enjoying a deep gum cleaning and some pretty good anesthesia. 

I could have canceled the appointment, like most of the patients that day who had probably planned to drive. But thankfully I live in a town with public transportation. Thanks to the drivers, and thanks to the City of Bangor for recognizing the bus as a vital service, and keeping it running on a day when most of us would have rather stayed home.