Slower Traffic

Where Have All the Small Stores Gone?

Hank Garfield

A packet of jigsaw blades fits easily into a pocket of my autumn jacket. It so happened that I needed a blade on a recent November afternoon, and I had to think a minute on the easiest way to get one.

There used to be a hardware store in Penobscot Plaza that I could walk to. There used to be one on Broadway that was easy to reach to by bus. But they are gone. With a twinge of sadness, I realized that my best option was Home Depot, out on Stillwater Avenue, one of Bangor’s busiest car corridors. I slung my bicycle onto the Community Connector bus and headed off to the nearest corporate megastore to buy an item smaller than my hand.

We had been doing a home construction project, the lovely Lisa and I, and so far, everything too heavy or too bulky to carry home had been delivered. But sometimes you need to run out and get something. This is when owning a car can seem like a necessity – or at least an awfully handy convenience.

The store is set back from the street by a massive parking lot, sectioned off by raised asphalt islands into smaller lots. There is no designated bus stop, no sidewalk or walkway for pedestrians. Nor are any bike racks in evidence. Bus passengers must navigate the parking lot on foot, and bicyclists at their peril. I locked my bike to an outdoor display of garden tools and went in to find my blades.

As I pedaled home through the car traffic, I pondered the absurdity of operating a two thousand-pound, gas-burning, space-occupying machine to obtain one pocket-sized package of saw blades. Doesn’t anybody consider this, well, wasteful?

It’s bad enough for someone like me, who has chosen not to own a car and to live with the inconveniences. It’s worse for people who have no choice: those who can’t drive, due to medical, financial, or other reasons.

In 1999, I packed my kids, the dog, the cat, and all our worldly belongings into an Aerostar van and a U-Haul trailer and moved from California to Maine. We tried to take local roads instead of the Interstate when we could. As we went through Illinois and Indiana, we began to sense the same story in every town. The brick post office and a church or two in the old town center, and then, a mile or more away, at the junction with the highway, a cluster of the same 15 or 20 corporate businesses. The same chains in every town. I hoped it would never happen to Maine.

But it has. It just took a quarter of a century longer to happen here. You can no longer walk down to Joe’s Hardware Store and buy a rake, or a set of jigsaw blades, or anything else you might need. You have been handed another reason to own and drive a car, and another alternative has been eliminated.

It’s not just hardware stores. Downtown of small cities like Bangor seem to be replete with restaurants and bars and places to buy art or antiques, but mostly devoid of outlets for the practical items of day-to-day life. I’ve had similar problems getting ink cartridges, fresh fruit, cleaning supplies, clothing, and scotch tape. The whole idea of walkable cities and downtowns is predicated on the idea that people can live, work and shop in a small area. If you must go to an outlying box store to get what you need, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Shouldn’t city planners be considering this when they draw up zoning regulations?

Car ownership would not seem like such a necessity in an environment where Joe’s Hardware could coexist with Home Depot. But powerful forces seem to want as many of us to drive and own cars as possible. Never mind the millions of Americans excluded from such a system, or the damage our dependence on cars inflicts on the natural world. The car is encouraged and incentivized at every turn.

But we can do something about it, however small and incremental. We can patronize pedestrian-friendly businesses. We can eschew drive-throughs. As much as possible, we can avoid the big-box stores. There isn’t always a choice. That’s why we need to use the choices we still have.

The New Bangor Transit Center

Hank Garfield

The new downtown bus station in Bangor’s Pickering Square is almost finished. I’ll be writing more on this soon, but to celebrate, I’m revisiting a post from January 2020, just before the city council vote that set this all in motion, interspersed with photos from the construction process. This is proof positive that positive things can happen when a determined group of citizens makes a concerted effort to improve their community.

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It’s coming down to crunch time for those of us who ride the bus. The Bangor City Council will vote on Monday, January 27 whether or not to build a central depot for the Community Connector bus system in Pickering Square.

I’m in favor of it, and so were three-quarters of the attendees at a council workshop on January 13. The importance of the issue was underscored by the overflow crowd, which could not fit into the room.

Those in opposition tended not to be bus riders, and I will repeat the invitation I offered at that meeting: take a day, or a week, or whatever time you have, and use the system before trying to redesign it.

Opponents of the Pickering Square hub have put forth a series of shifting positions. There was the so-called “Joni Mitchell option” proposed a couple of years ago to pave the square and put up a parking lot. Some of the same people are now advocating for a green space and pedestrian mall. Others want to wait years and possibly decades to build a multi-modal transportation “hub” far from the center of Bangor’s radiating street design.

And despite two commissioned studies that affirmed Pickering Square as the optimal spot for a bus hub, a minority of those in attendance, and a minority on the council, continue to call for more information before moving forward.

This should be recognized for what it is: a delaying tactic, until some hypothetical future study, at further cost, yields the recommendations they want.

The idea that the city should gather more detailed information on current ridership, for example, seems reasonable on the surface. But it is somewhat beside the point. Any plan will need to include not only the people who ride the bus now, but also those who can be convinced to ride an improved bus system in the future. Later hours – the next big hurdle – will help with this. But so will a central, comfortable, and above all, visible downtown bus hub. It’s time to get it done.

Cities all over the world have found that reducing the number of cars in their downtown areas improves the business climate as well as the physical climate. Bangor needs to join this growing movement.

I was glad to see at the recent meeting that many business owners in downtown Bangor get this. The bus is a built-in delivery system for customers and employees. One bus can obviate the need for as many as 30 parking spaces. A bus makes less noise, takes up less space, and creates less pollution than the number of cars required to transport an equal number of passengers.

I’m not against cars. A certain number of people need to have them, for various reasons. What I am against is the unchecked proliferation of cars, the official encouragement of driving at the expense of other forms of transportation, and the tendency of municipalities to design and implement infrastructure for the near-exclusive benefit of drivers and car owners.

We are living in the Late Automobile Age. Many Americans, especially the young, are beginning to realize that individual car ownership is not the necessity we have been told that it is. But the drumbeat from the automobile and advertising industries has been so relentless over the past several decades that it is difficult for some people to imagine a different future.

It will take time to loosen the grip of the car culture on the American way of life. But lasting, fundamental change happens in increments. It happens in small steps, like electing representatives to city councils who understand the liberating potential of public transportation. Building a bus hub in Pickering Square is but one small step in an ongoing process. But it is a step in the right direction.

Slower Traffic Writes Again

Hank Garfield

I started this blog nearly seven years ago, and gave up owning a car eight years before that. But in a sense, I started it back in the 20th century, as a kid from Maine stuck in a middle-aged body in Southern California.

“This is no way to live,” I muttered to myself almost every day, often when mired in a traffic jam on a four-lane freeway. There was plenty to do in San Diego, but you had to be willing to sit in traffic for almost any of it, because there were always a thousand people trying to do the same thing, and we were all trying to do it in cars.

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