Maine

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.

“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.

Across the Great Divide

Hank Garfield
Amtrak’s Southwest Chief in Raton, New Mexico

My previous out-of-town trip on public transportation was to Brooklin, Maine, at the end of a long peninsula about 50 miles from Bangor. My next trip was a little longer.

I hadn’t been all the way across the country on Amtrak since my kids were small and I could take one for half price and the second for free. That was in the 1990s, when I lived in San Diego and owned a car. The routes haven’t changed. I’ve changed. The young father has become a senior citizen, on his way west to visit his adult daughter.

Julian, California is a small town more than four thousand feet up in the mountains east of San Diego. It’s where my kids were babies and attended their first schools. Small towns in California aren’t all that different from small towns in Maine. Julian is as insular and isolated as Brooklin. And, like Brooklin, it’s served by public bus only on Fridays.

To cover the 3,400 miles between my home and my daughter’s, I used a combination of buses and trains, resorting to a car only at the very beginning and end of the trip. It’s a mile, give or take, from my house to the Concord Coach depot on Union Street. A bus leaves from there promptly at 7 AM every day, stops in Augusta and Portland, and arrives at South Station in Boston by 11:30. The train to Chicago leaves at 12:50. The area around the station looked bad and smelled worse. There was a lot of construction going on and no place to buy a newspaper. The news stand in the lobby had been ripped out. I finally found a Boston Globe at a store several blocks away. The train to Chicago left right on time.

All the way across the country, in fact, my trains ran on time. We left Albany more than half an hour late, but made up the time over a rainy night across New York and Ohio and got into Chicago ten minutes early. I got the full four-hour layover between trains, enjoying a leisurely lunch, a walk along Lake Michigan, and another protracted search for a newspaper. I guess people don’t read physical newspapers much anymore. A pity, since on a train a newspaper is much more useful than a computer.

Three days riding in coach is more comfortable at thirty-five than it is at sixty-five, but a train is still ten times better than a bus and twenty times better than a plane. Beds on the train are several times more expensive than coach tickets, and many of the sleeper units don’t have windows. The coach seats are nicely spaced, the trains are usually about half full, there’s a club car and an observation car, and the train makes ample stops for passengers to get out and walk around. 

A train allows you to see things you don’t see from the highway: a horse rolling on its back in a yard, the backsides of industrial parks, the extensive wetlands of central Massachusetts, flooding along the mighty Mississippi and its tributaries, the high plains of New Mexico across which Clint Eastwood drifted on horseback with his poncho and guns. There’s a stop in La Plata (rhymes with “See ya latah”), a Missouri town in the middle of nowhere, smaller than either Brooklin or Julian, where nonetheless a dozen passengers disembarked.

We arrived in Los Angeles, as in Chicago, ten minutes ahead of schedule. A recent mudslide had imperiled a section of track near San Clemente, so it was a train to Irvine, a bus to Oceanside, then back on the train to San Diego. (Amtrak comped this part of my trip, which, together with my senior discount, brought the total cost down under $200.) I got off the train in Solana Beach, dipped my feet in the Pacific, then took a local bus to Escondido and another bus up into the hills to Ramona, just twenty-two miles from Julian. My daughter met me there and drove me the rest of the way to her home in the mountains.

The return trip was a red-eye flight to Boston, the T to North Station, the Downeaster train to Portland, and good old Concord Coach back to Bangor. 

If you’re thinking about a similar trip, be sure to research the available routes in advance. Leave plenty of wiggle room to make connections. It’s not always evident how to get from one service to another – Amtrak to local bus, for example. I looked up my whole potential itinerary on line before I left Maine. Bring something to read during the inevitable waits. And don’t compare the travel times to driving or flying. You might not get there as fast, but you will arrive in a better state of mind.

The Mighty Mississippi near Fort Madison, Iowa