public transportation

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

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.

Recent Adventures in Public Transportation – 3

Hank Garfield
Rockland Harbor

I drove to Rockland and back in one day recently. I could have taken the bus. But the only bus on the route leaves Bangor at 7 a.m. The return trip leaves Rockland at 3:30 p.m. Even in September, that’s much too early to leave the coast on a sunny day with the afternoon southerly sea breeze kicking up. 

Once upon a time, there were two daily buses serving the coastal route from June to October. You could leave Bangor at seven, spend the whole day on the water, have a nice dinner in Rockland, and catch the late bus at 9:30. Or you could choose to leave Bangor in the late morning or Rockland in the late afternoon. You had options. But the pandemic changed all that. 

I can’t blame Concord Coach, really. They’re just trying to stay in business at an uncertain time for public transportation. I have noticed that ridership on the route has increased. The buses are fuller now that the number of daily trips has been halved. But that doesn’t account for all of the increase. People are discovering that it’s a good deal. The buses are punctual and comfortable. The price is comparable to the cost of the gas you would otherwise use, without the work of driving. 

The primary problem of public transportation in the United States is that we cling to a business model for it. People want buses and trains to turn a profit, or at least break even. They forget that the single most subsidized form of transportation in this country is the private automobile.*

The expectation of profit has left us with a few bus lines that provide skeletal service between Bangor and Portland, Bar Harbor and the Downeast coast, and Aroostook County. But there is no interconnected network, though the different bus lines do their best to co-ordinate schedules. It’s not unusual for people traveling by bus to be stranded in Bangor overnight.

Business, by and large, does well with concrete commodities created in competition. Build a better product; people buy it; the company profits; everybody makes money. But services – education, health care, police protection, public transportation – deal in a different coin. They work best when cooperative and connected.

Tax dollars spent on public transportation more than pay for themselves in the overall economy. Public transportation gets people to jobs and hobbies and medical appointments and vacations. We need more of it.

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* – There is a raft of literature on this. I have cited some of it in previous posts, and I don’t need to repeat the arguments here. Construction and maintenance of parking lots and parking spaces is just one example of welfare for cars.