Maine has been a destination for tourists since before I was born. And no, I wasn’t born in Maine, but it was a near thing – my parents raced back to Philadelphia from their summer home in Deer Isle on Labor Day weekend, and I came into this world two days later.
Ten years would pass before we made Maine our year-round residence, and, though there have been extended absences in the Midwest and in California and currently, in Eastern Europe, Maine has remained the place I call Home ever since. It’s where I vote and pay taxes, and it’s the place I’ll go all Greenpeace over if the government ever opens up the north Atlantic seaboard to oil exploration. For what makes Maine special is its coast, one of the most beautiful places in the world.
But the coast is now in danger of being loved to death by people in cars. We can’t blame the tourists either, or the summer people, or the transplants like me, or more recent arrivals. Check out the license plates on a summer weekend in Portland, Bar Harbor and Stonington, and you will see that much of Maine summer traffic is homegrown.
I don’t choose those three communities randomly. They were the focus of a recent piece in the Working Waterfront, the monthly newspaper published by the Island Institute. The point of the story, written by Tom Walsh, is that Maine coastal towns and cities of all sizes are plagued by seasonal parking problems, and are struggling to come up with solutions.
Too many of those proposed solutions, though, focus on the availability of parking rather than the surplus of cars. Bar Harbor is contemplating a parking garage. Stonington is looking at buying up old houses as they come up for sale and razing them. Portland, served by Amtrak and an airport, wants more parking for all the short-term visitors who come to the city by car.
The problem with these proposals is that they encourage more people to drive. The late Jane Holtz Kay, author of Asphalt Nation, wrote of the phenomenon of “generated traffic.” Build a new highway, and it will soon fill up with additional drivers wanting to use it. A clear illustration of this is Interstate 495, built as a bypass around Boston traffic congestion, and now a congested mess in its own right.
The same is true of parking lots and parking garages. When people hear that there’s a new parking garage in Bar Harbor, they will think that the parking problems have been alleviated, and they will get in their cars and drive there, filling up the garage and leaving the town to look for still more parking.
Stonington in my youth was a working waterfront backed by houses where working people lived, built atop several levels of granite ledge. It’s the prettiest town in Maine when seen from its proper vantage point – a boat on the water. What will it look like when that view is pockmarked by parking lots?
Maine’s coast offers alternatives to the automobile, if we only use a little bit of imagination. Before the construction of the Deer Isle Bridge in 1939, you couldn’t drive to Stonington. I like to go there in the summer, but I hardly ever drive. From Rockland, you can get to Stonington by boat in a few hours.
Maine’s unbridged islands are served by out-and-back ferries. Why can’t we have a ferry service running alongthe coast – one that starts in Portland and touches at Rockland and Stonington on its way to Mount Desert Island? Why can’t Deer Isle start its own version of the Island Explorer bus service? Why can’t we get going on a light-rail system linking Bangor with Bar Harbor?
Walsh uses the word “inherent” to describe what he calls the tsunami of summer traffic in Acadia National Park. But there’s nothing inherent about it. There is no reason that Park Loop Road should be open to private cars. It would be a much more pleasant experience for all if the road were restricted to buses, bicyclists, and pedestrians. Indeed, the system of carriage roads in the park was built for the purpose of keeping cars out.
The greatest transportation challenge of the 21stcentury will be to get people out of their cars. It will take creative solutions that address the real issue, which is not how to accommodate more and more cars, but how to reduce their number. The Maine Coast is a good place to start.
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