Maine

The High Cost of Cheap Gas

Hank Garfield

I have to come clean about all the driving I’ve been doing. Personal matters have necessitated several targeted trips, and an ongoing relationship with the rental car company. And while I haven’t left Maine since returning from Bulgaria three years ago, it’s a big state, and without a car it can be difficult to get there from here.

Every year I rent a car maybe half a dozen times. This year I’m likely to double that. It’s still cheaper than owning one. The break-even point is at about 75 days. 

So yes, I’ve noticed the gas prices. I’ve paid them. I’ve winced at the pump when the cost to fill the rental car comes out close to the rental itself. And I remain thankful that I don’t use a car to commute to a job, or to run small errands, and that I live in a place where car ownership is not the necessity most Americans think it is.

Everybody likes to blame politicians for gas prices. Even people with environmental bumper stickers on their hybrids are going to take a financial hit if they live out in the country and drive more than 20 miles to and from work. But as I careened down Interstate 95 at more than seventy miles an hour, with other humans whizzing past me in their own isolation chambers every few minutes, I reflected that the price of fuel is but a skim of oil on the surface of a deeper problem.

The interstate highway system was born the year before I was, with the stroke of a pen by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Funded almost entirely by taxpayers, the Federal-Aid Highway Act was a massive subsidy to the automobile and truck industries. It spawned suburbs, shopping malls, and bedroom communities miles from centers of employment. Cheap gas and postwar prosperity brought two cars in the driveway, cars as graduation presents, and the expectation of a lifetime of car ownership.

Sixty years on, many of us are locked into lives that depend on our ability to get to destinations quickly, sometimes on short notice. Some of us drive great distances to work; others juggle busy schedules punctuated with drive-through breakfast and banking, and grocery stores far from home surrounded by parking lots. Whatever your situation, if you depend on your car on a daily basis, you are at the mercy of gas prices. You have to pay them. No one likes feeling helpless.

The last time gas prices spiked, in 2008, Americans looked for alternatives. Public transportation saw a significant increase in ridership. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, right? If the bus fare is competitive with the price of gas, you get to vote with your dollars. But this time around, we had the pandemic. People withdrew into their cars and drove faster and more dangerously – with bad results for bicyclists and pedestrians.

Public transportation is the future, though, and if the high cost of gas spurs a few more Americans to give up their cars, then I can live with it. As I’ve noted in previous posts, American gas prices are lower than in most of the world. We should be paying more – gas taxes are at a historic low. I’ll pay six bucks a gallon to fill up my rental car if some of the money is invested in public transit. I think a lot of us want to live less car-dependent lives. People just need a little encouragement. 

Still, it’s painful in the short term for those who have little choice but to drive. I sympathize. I’ve been there. But the problem isn’t the cost of gas. It’s the cost of our automotive lifestyle.

Note: I cribbed the title of this post from The High Cost of Free Parking, a book by UCLA economist Donald Shoup. He argues that subsidized parking encourages more parking lots, which encourages zoning friendly to cars and hostile to pedestrians. This is a gross oversimplification, but you get the picture. By keeping gas prices artificially low, we have created a car-dependent culture, and escaping from it is like trying to escape from Alcatraz.

Hopeful

Hank Garfield

This year Spring arrived all at once, over a weekend that rolled Good Friday and Easter, the Kenduskeag Canoe Race, four day games at Fenway Park, and the Boston Marathon all into one four-day package. The Red Sox are playing as I write this, and it’s not even noon. My bicycle has a new chain and fresh air in the tires. The sun is shining. Today is Try Transit Day in Bangor, and the already low fares for the Community Connector buses are halved, in an effort to attract new riders.

I’m having trouble finding the necessary focus to write about all this, so please forgive me if this entry seems to be about a lot of things. I usually write a baseball piece around Opening Day, but I’m sad that the inevitable has finally happened and the designated hitter will now be standard across both leagues. This follows the election of David Ortiz, the greatest DH the pro game has yet seen, into the Hall of Fame. Never mind that he was half a player – if you’re going to have a DH, it might as well be someone with an outsized personality who repeatedly rose to the occasion, and happened to play for your favorite team.

But if pitchers (except Shohei Ohtani) aren’t going to hit anymore, they should at least be allowed to pitch. Someone needs to tell this to Dave Roberts, manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I’ll always love Roberts the player for The Stolen Base Heard ‘Round the World. But Roberts the manager has pulled a rookie from a no-hitter in progress in his first major league start, and earlier this month he removed Clayton Kershaw from a perfect game. Insanity.

Baseball is no longer America’s game. We prefer the belligerence of our brand of football and its obvious military underpinnings. Television buries the World Series at night to accommodate the fall football schedule. The Super Bowl is our big annual sporting event, and it happens in February, the bleakest month of the year.

I’m old enough now to let most of this stuff go. Easter is a time to celebrate, not to whine. Baseball will survive. In the first inning I caught on TV this year, the Red Sox started a six-run rally with a walk, a single, a sacrifice bunt, and a sacrifice fly. Three straight doubles followed, but small ball opened the door. It put a smile on my face when I went to pick up the bicycle from the shop, in preparation for cycling along the course of the Kenduskeag Canoe Race two days later.

This year I had friends in both the canoe race and the Boston Marathon. I’ll never run a marathon, but I’d like to do the canoe race before I run out of “one of these years.” I suppose what I like best about the canoe race is that it’s first time all year I see a bunch of boats on a body of water. My own boat has a mast and two sails, and requires a bit of preparation before it floats in the spring. But the canoe race tells me that it won’t be long.

Maine is the best place to live in the United States. Having lived in several other places, I’m convinced of this. Sure, our winters are long, but they’re not that stressful if you don’t have to drive in them. Spring, summer, and fall are magical. And Maine is mostly filled with friendly, reasonable people who care about their community and quality of life.

Try Transit Day is an example of this, as public transportation slowly bounces back from the pandemic. The skeleton of the new bus terminal is rising in Bangor’s Pickering Square. When it is completed later this year, it will be a centerpiece of the downtown. Everyone who visits Bangor for an event will see it, and will know that Bangor is committed to a future in which public transportation is a fixture, and not something to be “tried.” We did that, fellow Bangorians, and we should be proud.

More challenges lie ahead, as we navigate the Late Automobile Age in our mostly rural corner of the country. But after an Easter weekend filled with buses, bicycles, boats, and baseball, it’s hard not to be just a little hopeful.

Pro-Choice on Transportation

Hank Garfield

Recently I rented a car, and temporarily rejoined the American car culture. I needed to get to Waterville, Augusta, and the Blue Hill peninsula, all within the span of a few days. I picked up the car at Bangor International Airport at noon on Monday with the promise to return it at the same time Friday.

Every time I pull out of a rental car lot, I realize that most of the people I know do this every day. They get in the car and go somewhere. Driving is as much a habit to most Americans – and certainly most Mainers – as my morning coffee is to me. 

But this time around, another thought kept vying for attention, and it was this: “Why do I have to do this by car? Why aren’t there any other options?”

Waterville is 60 highway miles from Bangor, Augusta 20 miles beyond that. Why isn’t there a train? Why is there hardly any bus service at all? (Waterville is served by Greyhound, and Augusta by Concord Coach. Trips are infrequent. It is not possible to travel round-trip between Bangor and Waterville in the same day.)

The Blue Hill peninsula is made up of small towns connected by rural roads that I know intimately. It’s where I grew up, and where I survived my teenage driving adventures (not everyone was so lucky). There was no public transportation then, and there’s precious little now. We lived like the characters in Richard Hooker’s M*A*S*H Goes to Maine:

            Laurie’s niece, Nancy Barnes, knew that it’s quicker to drive four miles in the area of Eagle Head than to make a phone call, so she jumped into her car, drove to the home of Tony Holcombe, found him mowing his lawn and gave him the word. Tony responded by mounting his station wagon and driving to Nancy’s house with all the enthusiasm, if not the skill, of Stirling Moss.

That’s the Maine I remember from my childhood (though I had to Google Stirling Moss.) In Blue Hill we had a name for new arrivals from larger places: Straphanger. Sometimes it was shortened to just “Strap.” But the reference was clear: people on public buses sometimes stand, and hang onto a strap. Blue Hill had no public buses.

Maine once had much more robust public transportation than it does now. The Automobile Age killed most of it off. But consider this: the roots of the car culture don’t go that deep. Interstate 95 north of Augusta is younger than I am. It hasn’t long been possible to blast from Bangor to Waterville in under an hour. Now people do it every day, to the point where the proliferation of cars and trucks threatens the ecosystem, the economy, and our quality of life. But it’s going to be hard to convince the lifelong car owner that maybe there’s a better way. It took a lot to convince me.

Nonetheless, it’s imperative that we try. Cars are choking the planet. The average worker, when liberated from the obligation of car ownership, has thousands more dollars annually to spend on more sustainable and economically beneficial goods and services. But public transportation always faces the same Catch-22: More people would use it if service were more frequent, but governing bodies don’t want to ramp up service until more people use it.

I turned in the car on Friday and took the bus home. You have to call the dispatcher because the airport isn’t on the Community Connector’s regular route. Still, I was glad to be free of the car – a white Kia with a sloped back and blind spots that could touch 90 miles an hour on the Interstate before I even noticed. Everyone was going at least 75. We live such frantic lives.

It had rained on the coast and I brought back the car filthy but full, sixty dollars and change for all the gas I used, at four-something a gallon. People are grumbling about gas prices. What they should be upset about is not having the choice to spend the money on bus or train fare instead.