The public debate over Pickering Square encapsulates the essence of this blog.

(For readers unfamiliar with Bangor, Maine, the small city where I live, Pickering Square is a public area in the heart of downtown, dominated by a parking garage. It’s also the nexus of the Community Connector public bus system.)

A recent meeting of Bangor’s business and economic development committee, which reports to the city council, highlighted opposing views on how best to develop Pickering Square to meet Bangor’s future needs. Four options were presented, but most of the debate centered on two of them. One would keep the bus depot where it is, which was the recommendation that emerged from a recent three-year study. The other, quickly dubbed the Joni Mitchell Option by a member of the audience, would pave Pickering Square and put up a parking lot.

The Joni Mitchell Option makes no specific provision for the central bus depot, other than moving it out of Pickering Square to some as-yet unspecified location.

There’s more parking behind the parking garage, and at the Key Bank complex adjacent to Pickering Square. The parking garage itself is rarely full. Yet some people want to tear out the heart of Bangor’s public transit system to make room for even more parking. The committee heard from several downtown business owners on the purported need for additional downtown parking. It also heard from several bus advocates, including me.

Toward the end of the meeting, Councilor Cary Weston expressed frustration that the city has talked about renovating Pickering Square for the past six years but has not committed to a plan. “I’m tired of hearing what we shouldn’t do,” he said. “I’d like to see a solution brought to the table.”

In my next post, I will take Councilor Weston up on his challenge, and present a positive, forward-looking vision for Pickering Square. But first, I have to address a pernicious idea that won’t die but could cripple downtown for decades to come if implemented: moving the bus depot out of the downtown area.

However, mankind is also not to admit to anyone that he has trouble getting an erection, as mankind could then become suddenly generic soft cialis manUNkind. There can be various levitra samples contributing factors for impotence. Make cialis discount pharmacy your script friendly and natural. It is the most convenient form of Sildenafil for those people, who have issues with swallowing viagra prescription tablets. As councilor Gibran Graham pointed out, Bangor is a hub, centered on the area around Pickering and West Market Squares. All the major transportation arteries radiate from this center. Any viable bus system needs to be built on the framework of this existing reality. It’s natural for the buses to congregate downtown, because all roads lead there.

The worst idea floated at Tuesday’s meeting was to move the bus depot to Outer Union Street, near the Concord Coach bus station and the airport. This would take the bus hub far from the city’s real hub, creating a lopsided route system in which one could conceivably have to ride one bus out of downtown to connect to a bus going to the University of Maine, in the other direction. It’s an unworkable idea that should be buried, once and for all.

What troubles me most is that a downtown business owner promoted it, and that a significant number of downtown business owners don’t see the bus as an asset that delivers potential customers to their doors. I hear business owners when they say, “We need to bring more people downtown.” I agree. It does not follow that we need to bring more cars downtown. Studies show that public transportation, pedestrian space, and bicycle infrastructure boost business much more effectively than adding parking spaces. Many cities have subtracted parking, or raised the price, and found that businesses have thrived as a result. Why? The shopping experience is better in an area that isn’t choked with cars.

And yet it’s hard to get people past the prejudice of the bus as the “loser cruiser” whose passengers don’t have the money to spend at downtown businesses. I shop downtown because it’s easy to get there by bus, or on foot, or by bicycle. Judging from the turnout at Tuesday’s meeting, I’m not alone. The Community Connector, for all its limitations, is a tremendous asset to Bangor that the city needs to promote and improve upon. It needs to be at the center of town, because it is central to town.

I started this blog as a pebble tossed into the pond of assumptions about the way we use our cars. Bangor has a magnificent opportunity to create a future with a vibrant downtown where people walk and greet each other on the street, instead of honking at each other at traffic lights. A visible bus depot, at a well-traveled central location, is essential to that future.

Continued next week…

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Winter is the time of year I’m most thankful that I don’t own a car.

It’s also the time of year I’m most grateful to friends willing to give me rides when the temperature drops below zero. This includes the lovely Lisa, who refuses to let me walk the half-mile or so to the downtown bus stop when conditions are at their most brutal.

Does this make me a hypocrite? Probably. But as I’ve written before, we are quick to condemn hypocrisy in others and slow to acknowledge it in ourselves. Vegetarians have been known to wear leather, environmentalists to use oil, and conservatives to live out their late years on Social Security and Medicaid. Most of modern life consists of compromise between our beliefs and our situations.

We live in a world of cars, whether we like it or not. The founding father of the car culture is not Karl Benz, who invented the automobile, but Henry Ford, who brought cars to the masses. The car itself is a technological marvel, an order-of-magnitude improvement on the horse. But too much of a good thing is still too much.

By the late 20^th century, the United States was crisscrossed with limited-access highways from sea to shining sea. Outside of a few east coast cities, car ownership has become an American expectation. You can’t build a business without adequate parking, or a house without a driveway. Many jobs either require you to own a car or offer you a free parking space at work and no discount if you don’t use a car to get there. Traffic is the first topic of discussion when planning public events.

Order Sildenafil sample cialis online is one the best viable treatment for your problem, the article would give you deeper travel. Last Longer Pills Naturally viagra online Increasing Sperm CountWhen you are trying to get pregnant you want to have the best chance possible. Perhaps one day the heroic Navy SEALs, the tadalafil from cipla same ones he lauded on Thursday, will face charges as well. Now days thought for this issue is generally for those djpaulkom.tv order cheap viagra men who are facing this problem from starting due to some chemical imbalance in their body which are responsible for the person to be facing such relationship issues. If you don’t own a car, and don’t live in a major city, chances are that you are young, old, poor, or physically challenged in a way (e.g. sight impairment) that prevents you from driving. Few of us here in the hinterlands have become carless by choice. But our numbers are growing.

I have many disagreements with the millennial generation: their indifference to spelling and grammar, their naïve politics, their preference for football to baseball. But I commend them for their willingness to take on the conventional wisdom that we all need cars. In significant numbers, they are pushing for walking communities, neighborhood stores, and robust public transportation. They’ve seen through the advertising and the cultural peer pressure, and come to the sensible realization that cars can be shared, or rented, or bypassed in favor of buses, boots, and bicycles.

Which brings me back to the point I started writing about. Winter is the worst time of year to be dependent on a car. You are forever shoveling it out, scraping ice off the windshield, and skidding on snow-covered streets. While I’m grateful for rides to the bus stop on frigid mornings (and more than willing to shovel the driveway in return), I’m glad to be spared the expense of snow tires and antifreeze and the stress of winter driving.

For the past several years I’ve tried to do my Christmas shopping downtown. This year, a few gifts necessitated a trip to the commercial area around the Bangor Mall. I boarded the Mount Hope bus at 1:15. Fifteen minutes later, I disembarked at Bull Moose on Hogan Road. On foot, I navigated a shopping area designed for cars, first crossing Hogan Road (four lanes and no crosswalks), cut behind K-Mart and in front of Best Buy, emerging on Stillwater Avenue near the Goodwill Store. From there I hiked to the L.L. Bean outlet, and then caught the Stillwater bus back to downtown. The whole trip took less than 90 minutes.

It did require knowledge of the bus schedule, and the willingness to walk in a part of town that discourages walking. Had I missed my bus I would have had to wait an hour for the next one. And it was a mild day for December. I would not have made the trip in the subzero wind chill temperatures that descended on Maine a few days later.

For a reasonably healthy person, the bus can be combined with a good pair of boots, or, weather permitting, a bicycle, to complete errands as conveniently as one could with a car. It’s better to have a thriving downtown business district that offers what the Mall area does, but that will happen when people change their driving habits. It gives me something to hope for in these dark days of December.

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