Bangor Community Connector

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

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.

One Giant Leap… the new Bangor Transit Center opens

Hank Garfield
Before…

I’m super excited about the imminent opening of the new bus depot in downtown Bangor. The Bangor Transit Center in Pickering Square will have its official opening at 1 pm on Friday, December 9, and Slower Traffic will be there.

Nearly three years after the City Council gave the go-ahead for construction, the Transit Center opens a new chapter in the annals of Bangor area transportation. It’s a shining example of what a small but determined group of citizens can accomplish in the face of occasionally lukewarm official support. We did this, fellow bus passengers and advocates. A pebble thrown into a pond makes but a small ripple. But many small ripples make a wave.

It was never a sure thing. Various visions for Pickering Square were floated, including the so-called “Joni Mitchell option” of building a parking lot right next to a parking garage. Some people wanted the bus depot out by the airport, or atop a vacated gas station near Shaw’s supermarket on Main Street, or other outlying locations. But Pickering Square, at the hub of Bangor’s wheel of radiating traffic routes, was always the logical choice. On January 27, 2020, the City Council, by the narrowest of margins, agreed. I like to think that the several dozen supporters in the room that evening had something to do with the outcome.

The central location is important for several reasons. First, it’s convenient for passengers. Second, it brings people – potential customers – directly into the downtown business district. And third and most important, the central location sends a powerful message, to everyone who visits or spends time in downtown Bangor, that public transportation is central to the future of the greater Bangor area.

Those still married to their cars should be happy about it, too. Every bus passenger represents one more available parking space, one less car to wait behind at a traffic light, one less opportunity for an accident. The proximity of the parking garage makes it convenient to use the bus system in combination with your car, further reducing traffic congestion.

Of course, it’s only a beginning. I envision an extension of evening hours, restoration of Saturday service, and expansion of routes to nearby areas including Hermon, Orrington, and Winterport. I hope the new terminal will become a centerpiece of a wide, interconnected network of bus services that can take passengers just about anywhere they want to go. Bangor can be a model for small cities in rural states looking for a way forward from the Late Automobile Age.

But this Christmas season, let’s stop and celebrate this one momentous step. Let’s use the new Transit Center, and treat it with the respect it deserves. Put trash in containers, interact courteously with drivers, staff, and passengers, and honor the hard work of the many people who made it possible. See you on the bus.