Public Transportation in Maine is a lot like Sailing

I didn’t get my sailboat to Rockland on time this year for the North Atlantic Blues Festival, but I did catch some of the action on the water during Friendship Sloop Days. The Rockland Lobster Festival begins August 2.

From Bangor, it’s easy to get to Rockland without a car, and you don’t need a boat to do it. If you want to attend the Lobster Festival but don’t want to face the parking or the summer traffic on Route One, you can hop on a Concord Coach bus at 7 or 11 in the morning, spend a day on the coast, and board a return bus at either 4:15 or 9:30.

Why more people don’t take advantage of this escapes me. The round-trip cost is only $34. For a larger group, it makes sense to take a vehicle, but for one or two people, the bus is cheaper, much more convenient, and it doesn’t take any longer than it does to drive.

Later in August comes the American Folk Festival in Bangor. One might expect a few folks from the Rockland area to attend. But if they want to do it by bus, they’re sunk. While the Concord Coach schedule works beautifully for Bangor residents who want to spend a day on the coast, there’s no reciprocal schedule that allows a similar day trip in the other direction.

Portland, yes – and Rockland is probably more culturally connected to Portland than Bangor anyway. One could get on the bus that I get off at just before 9 a.m. and be in Portland well before noon, with stops in Damariscotta, Bath, Brunswick, and a few other towns. This is, as a Concord Coach official told me once, “the bread and butter of the route.” Surprisingly few passengers ride between Rockland and Bangor. That might change if buses began running in both directions at both ends of the day.

But that’s the windy nature of public transportation in Maine. There’s more available than most people know about, but you need to know which direction it’s going when. In order to ride it effectively, you have to strategize. Maine has many public transportation services, but they are seldom interconnected.

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Downeast Transportation runs a number of buses in Hancock and Washington counties. It’s an impressive service for a sparsely populated area, one I admit I’ve seldom used. My folks live in Brooklin, which is served one day a week (Fridays) by a bus from Ellsworth. In theory, I could take the West bus from Bangor on Thursday afternoon, spend the night in Ellsworth, and board the bus for Brooklin at 7:20 the next morning. After a scenic tour of Deer Isle and Stonington, I would arrive at the Brooklin General Store at 9:20. From there I’d have to walk.

I’ve sailed there faster. Of course the same thing happens whether you travel by sailboat or bus. You wait for a favorable window. You see places you never intended to see. You go miles out of your way for small gains toward your destination. The journey itself is sometimes worth the time it takes. And sometimes it’s not.

There’s also a daily bus between Bangor and Caribou, run by Cyr Bus Line, on a similar schedule, arriving in Bangor midday and turning around a few hours later. And local services abound, from the Belfast Shopper up to Bangor’s Community Connector.

While I might wish and lobby for expanded public transportation in Maine for the future, I think a central place for information on what’s available now would be a small but significant step in the right direction. With a little help and a lot of patience, you can get there from here.

Perhaps a future mission of this blog should be to ride all the different bus services in eastern Maine and bring back a report. I would need people to put me up in Calais and Caribou and other far-flung places. Or – better idea – any readers out there who use any of these buses and want to share? Please contact me at the Slower Traffic page on Facebook.

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Whither Wiscasset? To Bypass or Not?

When I was a child, and my family drove up to Maine each summer from Pennsylvania, we always passed through Wiscasset. It billed itself as “The Prettiest Village in Maine,” but what I remember most vividly were the two old wooden ships rotting on the western shore of the Sheepscot River. We always had time to look at them. Traffic slowed through there, even back then.

The ships are long gone now, and so is the nuclear power plant, Maine Yankee, which was built within sight of the picturesque village a few years after we moved to Maine for good. I used to look at it from the bridge while stuck in summer traffic.

Periodically, there’s a push on the part of frustrated motorists to build a bypass around the village. This would, of course, be done with taxpayer dollars that could be used toward better public transportation along the coastal Route One corridor.

Such bypasses were built in the 1960s around Belfast and Damariscotta, when it was cheaper to do, and the results, fifty years later, are evident. Both towns have thriving centers where people can walk and bicycle comfortably, while the through traffic stays on the highway. Places where bypasses weren’t built have become bottlenecks, like Wiscasset and Camden, or garish commercial strips, like Ellsworth (though I hasten to add that Ellsworth’s downtown has seen some improvement over the past few years).

But the battle to build a bypass around Wiscasset, pitting the interests of local businesses against those of through-drivers, never seems to end. Fifty years ago, back in the Middle Automobile Age, it might have worked. Gas was cheap and the car was king. Fifty years from now, in the year 2067, will Americans still be driving the way we do? Will we still be addicted to ours cars, no matter the cost?

There’s also the problem of induced, or generated, traffic: the principle that building new roads attracts new drivers. In an article for Wired magazine titled What’s Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse, Adam Mann pretty much spells it out:

“…if you expand people’s ability to travel, they will do it more, living farther away from where they work and therefore being forced to drive into town. Making driving easier also means that people take more trips in the car than they otherwise would. Finally, businesses that rely on roads will swoop into cities with many of them, bringing trucking and shipments. The problem is that all these things together erode any extra capacity you’ve built into your street network, meaning traffic levels stay pretty much constant. As long as driving on the roads remains easy and cheap, people have an almost unlimited desire to use them.”
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Mann is not as much a fan of public transportation as I am (he favors imposing tolls on well-traveled roads at times of high congestion, as some cities in Europe do). But a few trains and buses a day in the summer between Brunswick and Rockland might make a small dent in traffic, at a fraction of the cost of building a bypass.

Then there’s Acadia National Park. Cars clogged Cadillac Mountain Road to the point that the park had to close it several times over the holiday weekend. And someone flipped a van on Park Loop Road.

I love Maine as much as anybody else. I grew up here, and I’ve chosen to live here. But we’re in danger of loving it to death with cars. I believe the day will come when Acadia closes most of the park roads to private cars in peak season, allowing only bicyclists, hikers, and buses. People will grumble at first, but it will improve the park experience for everyone, not to mention the air quality. It is a national park, after all.

I also believe that public transportation along the Maine Coast will continue to grow, and to attract former drivers like me. Route One through Wiscasset will remain slow in the summer, as it has been my whole life. But that’s just Southern California on an average day. Except for a few summer weekends, Maine doesn’t have traffic.

We’re a rural state, full of places hard to get to by any other means. But cars can be shared, rented, borrowed or hired – everybody doesn’t have to own one. I hope to live long enough to see this movement take root.

Full disclosure compels me to report that I’ve driven – yes, in a car – to the coast in Brooklin three times already in the month of July. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it. The Maine Coast is a beautiful place, and summers are short.