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An Accumulation of Small Annoyances

Hank Garfield

When you decide to give up car ownership, two things will happen. You will walk more. And you will become, almost by default, an advocate for public transportation. Neither of these is a bad thing.

It helps if you live in a walkable community with both local and out-of-town bus service. In Bangor, we have the Community Connector and the Concord Coach bus systems. I hate to say anything negative about either of them, because I use them both a lot, and they are as essential to me as a parking space is to a car owner. On many mornings, I have walked the two blocks from my house up to the bus stop, boarded the Community Connector, ridden to the Concord Coach depot, and headed out of town.

Recently the Community Connector went to a fixed-stop system, which makes the routes more efficient and improves the reliability of the whole system. But there is no fixed stop at the Concord Coach depot. Riders transferring from one bus system to the other must get off the Community Connector at a sign down the block and walk approximately 100 yards, the length of an American football field. This isn’t a problem for a healthy person, but what of an older or physically challenged passenger with luggage? It makes no sense.

Twice now, I’ve had drivers refuse to let me off at the Concord Coach depot. They insist, as per the new rules, that I get off at the sign and walk. Then the bus continues on, right past the depot.

Small annoyances like this are a big reason more people don’t use public transportation. It would not take any longer for the driver to let transferring passengers off at the depot rather than the sign. But rules are rules, and they must be followed to the letter.

Concord Coach has rules of its own. The driver won’t let you off anywhere but at the depot. The afternoon bus from the coast arrives in Bangor at 5:30. This is five minutes too late to catch the last inbound Community Connector toward downtown. Sometimes I’ll see that bus after the Concord Coach gets off the interstate on Union Street.

In Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, where I lived for a year, there is regular bus service to Sofia, the capital, about an hour and a half away. The bus goes directly from one city to the other, but once in Sofia, it makes stops at major intersections to let passengers off who don’t need to go to the central bus station. This makes eminent sense, and provides a friendlier and more convenient experience for passengers. But Concord Coach won’t do it. Rules are rules.

The Community Connector drivers will routinely ask passengers if they need to make a connection to another Community Connector bus. Similarly, the Concord Coach driver will ask passengers coming up the coast if they need to connect to the Cyr bus to Aroostook County. They will hold the buses for a few minutes if anyone answers in the affirmative.

But I’ve never heard a Community Connector driver ask if anyone needs to meet a Concord Coach bus, or vice versa. There seems to be little effort to coordinate the services. Bangor once had a downtown Greyhound bus terminal, but that has disappeared over the horizon to Hermon, where the Community Connector has no service at all.

This isn’t just a local problem. It’s representative of the American piecemeal approach to public transportation. There’s no centralized clearinghouse for ready information on how to navigate from one system to another. The result is an accumulation of minor irritations like missed connections and forced walks and strict adherence to rules that ought to be more flexible. None of these things are debilitating by themselves. But an accumulation of them will discourage people from leaving their cars at home.

I’ve talked with many people who support public transportation and want to demonstrate demand by using it more. My answer to them is that they should use it anyway, even if it’s inconvenient, because transportation planners look at current numbers. It’s the only way to get past the circular argument that public transportation is unpopular in the present and therefore a poor investment in the future.

Public transportation seems unpopular because official policy incentivizes people to drive. If you want better and more comprehensive public transportation, invest some of your time in using what’s already here, despite the accumulation of tiny annoyances that discourage people from using it.

Drive-Thru Nation

Hank Garfield

For a time in the 1980s I lived in Julian, California, a small town high in the mountains east of San Diego. The last town of any size on the road, 22 miles before Julian, is Ramona, an agricultural community with a wide main street reminiscent of “Gunsmoke” and “High Noon.” It’s the last agglomeration of fast-food restaurants and chain grocery stores before the highway heads up over the mountains and into the desert beyond.

There was a chicken farm not far from Ramona, before the road begins to climb in earnest. Eggs were sold from a little shack in a generous dirt pull-off next to the highway. It was a good place to stop, stretch your legs, and pick up some eggs before negotiating the last miles of winding mountain road on the long drive from the populated cities near the coast.

I remember when they installed drive-thru service. It cracked me up, because the farm was in the middle of nowhere, and who was in a hurry to get to Julian? But you could now drive around the back of the shack, buy your farm-fresh eggs like a cheeseburger, and continue along your merry way without ever getting out of the car.

Forty years later, it still seems funny to me. But it was a harbinger of things to come. Two years ago, I wrote about being unable to get a cup of coffee in the lobby of a Dunkin’ Donuts while a line of cars waited at the drive-thru. In Bangor and Rockland, Dunkin’ franchises post signs warning drivers not to block the street when the drive-thru backs up. Meanwhile, inside space and service has diminished as customers opt to wait in a line of cars rather than people.

Dunkin’ Donuts was once a friendly place instead of an ATM for good coffee and cheap food. There was a Dunkin’ in Ellsworth on the corner of Main and High Street, and people would gather before work in the mornings to drink coffee from thick-walled mugs, and to talk with fellow human beings instead of ordering into an impersonal speaker. It’s long gone now, of course, replaced by an out-of-town pit stop a couple miles away with a larger footprint, a smaller seating area, and a wrap-around line for cars. No one arrives on foot, and no one talks to one another.

We live in Drive-Thru Nation now. Banking, prescriptions, eggs – you name it, you can likely get it through a car window. Is this a good thing? Perhaps if you’ve got five minutes to get to work and you’ve forgotten to eat breakfast and you’re willing to wait in your car as if you’re stopped for road construction, it might seem convenient. But why are we all running around in such a hurry in the first place, to the point where we can’t take the time for the small personal interactions that help sustain communities?

From the public expectation of free parking (I prefer to call it “socialized parking”), to the Wal-Martization of towns that once boasted an array of small and varied businesses, the destructive costs of our car-driven lifestyles are both widely apparent and widely accepted.

But what if customers had to pay an extra dollar at Dunkin’ Donuts and the Ramona egg farm to use the drive-thru? Would drivers still flock to them? Or would they take the incentive to re-connect, if only for a few minutes, with their fellow citizens?

The dollars could go toward public transportation, bike paths, downtown green spaces and walkable commercial zones. They could fund infrastructure that steers the incentives away from the isolation of cars toward the inclusion of community.

For the past three-quarters of a century, the United States has promoted cars and built transportation systems almost exclusively for car owners. Business and government have been equally complicit. It’s time to have a national conversation about this, over a cup of coffee that hasn’t been passed through a car window.

“I Can’t Take You Anywhere”

Hank Garfield
Rita at the recent eclipse in Greenville

Our dog is incorrigible in a car.

She isn’t in them often, and seldom in the same one twice since we went from a one-car to a no-car household about a year ago. But even in Lisa’s Jeep she was terrible. She chewed through a seatbelt the first time we left her alone. She barks, growls and snarls at every pedestrian she sees. In rental cars, she’s figured out how to open the power windows herself. She’ll lunge at motorcycles, other dogs, even oncoming trucks. She’ll invade the front seat and position herself at the center of the windshield, alert for all threats, real and imagined. She’ll lean on the driver or the front-seat passenger when the car goes around a curve. She’s a little better when she rides shotgun, but not much.

Rita, or sometimes Rita Mae, is a four-year old mix of possibly Rottweiler, Shar-pei, and some kind of hound (we don’t really know), with an abundant exuberance for life. We’ve had her for a little over two years. She’s personable but protective, sixty-odd pounds of potential energy that can turn kinetic in a hurry. Ask the mailman, the pizza delivery guy, or the two cops who pulled Lisa over for a missing taillight.

Bottling up all that energy in a car makes for interesting travels. But how else are you supposed to take your dog to the vet, or to the beach, or a total eclipse of the sun? Come to think of it, how are you going to get her to the kennel when you want to get away for a few days?

Veterinarians all seem to have offices on the outskirts of town. The kennel is a 35-minute walk from our house – doable for both of us, but logistically difficult, and it doesn’t open in the morning until after the Concord Coach bus has already departed for the coast. The Community Connector bus allows service dogs, but regular dogs must be in a carrier. I’m not strong enough to lift Rita plus carrier onto the bus. I would have to get a Flintstone model, with holes for the dog’s legs, and I doubt that such a thing is available, or that Rita would put up with it. And would she behave on a bus full of strangers?

Is there a dog taxi service in Bangor? Would a regular taxi – if you can get one – allow a dog? Uber is problematic enough without throwing a largish, excitable dog into the mix. That leaves rental cars and dog-tolerant friends. It seems ridiculous to rent a car for the day to take the dog to the vet, but part of not owning a car is taking responsibility for your own transportation needs. Most friends are happy to do an occasional favor, but you can’t make a habit of it. No one likes a freeloader.

Dogs don’t depend on cars, but dog owners often must. It seems like a good business model: take people and their dogs to various appointments and outings, at a cost less than a 24-hour car rental. There must be other dog owners without cars who would use such a service.

Some surely choose to take the path of least resistance (but most expense) and buy a car: another example of the American car culture creating a perceived necessity of something that should be one among several options. Vets and kennels don’t all need to be in outlying areas. Services should exist at reasonable cost for transporting pets and their owners. Not everyone wants to own a car, but much of our transportation infrastructure is built around the assumption that most people do. Rita’s attitude toward cars is much like mine: if it’s the only way to get there, then I guess I’ll put up with it. She acts out a lot more than I do, but that’s forgivable in a four-year old.

I’m not buying a car just for a dog who doesn’t behave in cars. A lot of people don’t behave in cars, either. What they – we – really need are viable alternatives.