Month: April 2017

Spring in Maine is like a Baseball Argument in a Traffic Jam

Hank Garfield

The only things more tedious than awaiting spring in Maine are: waiting for the umpires to review a replay in a baseball game, and sitting behind the wheel in a line of stalled traffic. Whose bad idea was it to replace an umpire’s eyes with a barrage of camera angles? And whose bad idea was it to herd everyone into cars?

It doesn’t make much sense to complain about things over which you have no control. That didn’t stop generations of Red Sox fans from bemoaning the sale of Babe Ruth, the trade of Sparky Lyle for Danny Cater, or Grady Little’s decision to leave Pedro Martinez in game seven of the 2003 ALCS an inning too long. I don’t complain about baseball anymore. The Red Sox have won three times, the Cubs won last year, and the apocalypse may be upon us. I don’t have any control of that, either.

The weather in Maine is a lot like baseball. We can watch, we can whine, but we can do very little, at least in the short run, to change the outcome. The Earth Day event to celebrate the Community Connector bus system has been postponed until the tenth of June. We can only hope that the sun might shine on that day– and on the future of public transportation in Maine.

What did I expect when I moved back here after nearly two decades in sunny southern California? I told myself I didn’t mind the snow as long as I didn’t have to drive in it. I took up cross-country skiing. I wore out a couple pairs of boots, and I learned to dress in layers when I left the house in the morning.

But April is the cruelest month. It wears you out with anticipation as it delivers one gray day after another. The weather smiled on the Kenduskeag Stream Canoe Race and my family’s annual Easter gathering. I missed them both with the flu. I never get the flu, and in my arrogant assumption of ongoing good health, I never get a flu shot, either. I’m not complaining. Illness happens, and this year it happened to me.

I used to complain about California traffic. “This is no way to live,” I muttered to myself while taking the kids to school in the morning, two freeway exits away. Maine does not have traffic. Last week I had a conversation about this on the bus with a man who had lived in Houston. We discussed Maine’s idea of traffic, which might occur on the odd tourist weekend at the base of the Maine turnpike. But even that is mild compared to San Diego – or Houston or any other Sun Belt city – on a normal day.
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When I came to Maine as a child, my family drove up Route One, through Brunswick and Bath, where the divided road still ends, and Wiscasset, which wasn’t so much of a bottleneck then. There’s a huge car dealership just outside Wiscasset that wasn’t there during my childhood. Route One can be slow through there in the summer, but it’s nothing Californians would call traffic.

Is it any wonder, then, that Mainers are cool to the concept of public transportation? The automobile saturation that plagues so much of our country is barely in evidence here. What is the problem, on a collective level, with everybody using a car? On an individual level it’s not so great – many people make themselves poor by failing to imagine a life without car ownership – but Maine’s roads are mostly uncongested, even in the summer.

Still, public transportation is something I can do something about – by using it as much as possible, by refusing to own a car, and by writing this blog. Even in Maine, many people do not need cars every day of their lives. Many households can reduce the number of vehicles in the dooryard and see significant savings as a result. It’s in everybody’s best interest to reduce our overall dependence on cars, and good public transportation is integral to that goal.

So I’ll keep lobbying for later bus hours, expanded routes, passenger trains, and a less entrenched car culture. Every person on the bus represents one less car stuck in traffic, a chunk of a paycheck that can be spent on something else, and a small reduction in greenhouse gases. It’s good for all of us.

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What is the true meaning of Earth Day?

Hank Garfield

 

In June 1989, five months after running aground and spilling its cargo all over Alaska’s Prince William Sound, the Exxon Valdez limped home to San Diego, still leaking a trail of oil.

I went down to see it at the shipyard, but the public wasn’t allowed in close and there wasn’t much to see. The costs of the American car culture are often hidden from view.

I’m reminded of this as Earth Day approaches, on the heels of Easter. The two celebrations of spring occur within a week of each other this year, thanks to the configuration of the Earth and Moon.

Though only 47 years old, Earth Day is now observed in more than 180 countries. Which makes sense when you think about it. Humanity has many religions, but, so far, only one planet.

The first Earth Day was a response to a massive oil spill near Santa Barbara, twenty years before the Exxon Valdez disaster. It was the brainchild of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat and early opponent of the Vietnam War. Nelson toured the California coastline in the aftermath of the spill and thought that the energy of the anti-war protests could be brought to bear on environmental issues.

From Nelson’s 2005 obituary in the New York Times:

More than 20 million Americans marked the first Earth Day in ways as varied as the dragging of tires and old appliances out of the Bronx River in White Plains and campus demonstrations in Oregon. Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York closed Fifth Avenue to vehicles. Congress shut its doors so lawmakers could participate in local events. Legislatures from 42 states passed Earth Day resolutions to commemorate the date.

Senator Nelson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 by President Bill Clinton, who praised him as “the father of Earth Day.”

The Santa Barbara disaster occurred in the heart of America’s car culture, within view of the Pacific Highway. More than 3 million gallons of crude oil fouled some of the most popular beaches in the world, and killed untold thousands of birds, fish and sea mammals.

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The Jan. 28, 1969, blowout was caused by inadequate safety precautions taken by Unocal, which was known then as Union Oil. The company received a waiver from the U.S. Geological Survey that allowed it to build a protective casing around the drilling hole that was 61 feet short of the federal minimum requirements at the time.

The resulting explosion was so powerful it cracked the sea floor in five places, and crude oil spewed out of the rupture at a rate of 1,000 gallons an hour for a month before it could be slowed.

It was the worst oil spill in the nation’s history – until 20 years later, when the Exxon Valdez dumped 11 million gallons of crude off the coast of Alaska.

In those twenty years, California and the United States, with bipartisan support, passed reams of environmental legislation. There is little doubt that these laws have improved all of our lives. Los Angeles still has smog, but not like it did in 1969, thanks to the requirement that all vehicles pass an emissions test before they can be registered. We still have bad oil spills, like the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, but we also have an enhanced awareness of our impact on the planetary ecosystem.

In the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill, Greenpeace ran an ad campaign with the slogan: “It wasn’t the tanker captain’s driving that caused the Alaska oil spill. It was yours.”

Even the car-happy cities of southern California are starting to take this to heart, and invest in public transportation. If we are serious about the environment – and the expanding observance of Earth Day shows that we are – there is no mission more important than promoting alternatives to the private car.

And that’s why I’ll be down in Bangor’s Pickering Square from noon to 2 pm on Saturday, April 22, Earth Day, to help celebrate the Community Connector bus system. There will be free food, activities for all ages, information and entertainment. The event is hosted by Transportation for All, a volunteer group working to improve bus service in the greater Bangor area.

Every bus passenger represents a car not driven, a tank of gas not purchased, a reduction in the risk of another oil spill. Bangor’s bus system dates back to 1972, just two years after the first Earth Day. Both traditions are worth honoring.

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A Great Country Needs a Great Train System

Hank Garfield

 

Many years ago I took my kids on a cross-country train trip. Amtrak was offering a great deal: I paid full fare for myself, half fare for the first kid, and the second kid rode for free. We bought a pass that allowed us three stops and 45 days to complete the trip, though we did it within the month of July. We visited family in Maine and Minneapolis, and spent a couple of days in San Francisco before returning to San Diego.

My son and daughter were seven and five, small enough to sleep comfortably in their seats. I don’t sleep much when I travel, but I did doze off in the observation car as the train sped through Kansas in the dead of night. We bought a pack of Amtrak playing cards, which I still have. The kids walked up and down the train during the day and made friends. On the third evening of the trip we pulled into Boston and took the subway to Fenway Park, where the Red Sox, who had a lousy team that year, won in eleven innings. The next day we took a bus to Maine.

The trip was not glitch-free. On the way back west, we decided to use a 90-minute layover in Chicago to visit the nearby Sears Tower, then the tallest building in the world. I hadn’t realized that going to the top involved a lot of standing in line and waiting for elevators. We watched helplessly from above as our tiny train pulled out of the station without us. My sister met us the following morning at the Greyhound station in Minneapolis, after an overnight ride on a crowded bus. In San Francisco I dropped my acoustic guitar on the stone floor of a hotel lobby, breaking its neck.

But my kids remembered that trip so fondly that ten years later, when we were living in Maine and planning a spring break trip to California, they insisted we go by train.

The experience was exponentially more pleasant that getting onto an airplane. We saw parts of the country you can’t see from the air or the Interstate. There was room to move around and get away from one another. Yes, the trains were late, and yes, federal subsidies kept the fares affordable. Amtrak’s critics are quick to point out the system’s costs and shortcomings. But as an American taxpayer, I want the opportunity to see my country by train, even if I only take advantage of it once a decade or so.

When I moved to California in the 1980s, I became involved with a group of people promoting high-speed rail in the corridor between Los Angeles and San Diego. Jerry Brown had already served two terms as governor and made two unsuccessful bids for the presidency. He had already earned the nickname “Governor Moonbeam” for backing high-speed rail and other futuristic projects. Today he’s governor again, throwing his weight behind a high-speed line connecting the Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas, and he’s still being ridiculed for it. The governors of Florida and Wisconsin rejected federal funds for high-speed rail projects that would have created jobs and alleviated traffic in their states.
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A great country needs a great train system. We have a mediocre one – which is still better than nothing. But why is it so hard to build and maintain modern, high-speed passenger train service in the United States? Why does it take so long? And why the unreasonable expectation of profitability, when we don’t apply the same standard to cars and trucks and airplanes?

In the years following World War II, while Europe and Japan were modernizing and developing their rail infrastructure, the United States built the Interstate Highway system, at a cost of more than $500 billion in 2008 dollars. The federal government subsidized 90% of this cost. Annual support of the Interstates costs more per passenger mile than keeping Amtrak running at its present, minimal level. And yet despite this massive government giveaway to the owners of cars and trucks, Amtrak continually faces threats of budget cuts or outright elimination.

It would be a shame if the federal government eliminated long-distance rail service and forced more people into cars and crowded airports. It would also go against the flow of history, at a time when Americans are waking up to the wastefulness of our car culture. I’m glad my kids got to see the country by train. I want tomorrow’s kids to have that same opportunity.

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