Thanks to a handful of modest construction projects, it’s getting a little bit easier to walk around Bangor these days.

“Walkability” is a buzzword of recent vintage, coined to describe centralized towns where goods and services are as easily accessible to pedestrians as to the owners of cars. Too many American communities remain car-centered, controlled by concerns about parking and traffic flow. But there’s a new awareness in the air that walkable towns see improvements to their business climates and quality of life when they limit the places that cars can go.

Bangor has made baby steps in this direction in recent months. By making Park Street one-way to cars down the hill and adding an island at the bottom, the city has turned one of its least friendly intersections into something a pedestrian can hope to navigate at normal walking speed. Similarly, the expanded sidewalks and reduced roadway at the top of this same hill by Somerset Street have made it possible to walk and not run across that intersection. But the city missed a golden opportunity in the heart of downtown when it elected to leave West Market Square open to cars.

The redesigned partial plaza is a marked improvement over the streetscape with parking on both sides that it replaced. But it could have been better. Now that the entrance to the Pickering Square parking garage has been moved, the only vehicles on the near side of the square are the Community Connector buses that converge every half hour during the day to pick up passengers. By closing a couple of side streets to vehicles, the city could have constructed a car-free zone bounded by Main and State Streets, the bus circle, and the Kenduskeag stream.

Any town of decent size in Eastern Europe has such a central pedestrian area. Cities much smaller than Bangor manage to set aside substantial street space for people rather than cars. You will see the occasional delivery vehicle, but you don’t have to dodge traffic when walking from one business to another. And these pedestrian areas thrive. People shop and congregate there. Bangor could surely benefit from a modest version of the same thing.

Imagine Broad Street, West Market Square, and Merchant Row all closed to cars, and Pickering Square empty of vehicles other than buses. Combined with the pedestrian bridge over the Kenduskeag Stream, this would create a central pedestrian area, still small by European standards but expandable, for all locals and visitors to Bangor to enjoy.

The problem is, of course, public perception. Eastern European towns and cities weren’t built around cars. There is no underlying assumption that everybody has one. But most Americans are accustomed to driving everywhere they need to go, and they tend to view any reduction in street capacity or parking as something taken away, rather than given. And yet, in every place it’s been tried, traffic reduction and limited automobile access has proven to be a gift that pays substantial dividends.

The point I’m trying to make is that a small initial inconvenience to drivers can be a boon to a community as a whole. Drivers get used to redirected routes, and people flock to the new pedestrian areas. Downtown businesses see an uptick in sales. It’s a win for everyone.
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Unfortunately, we take a few steps forward and a step back. The Bangor farmers market, which I’ve frequented all summer and fall, will relocate after Thanksgiving to its new winter home on Cleveland Street, way out by the airport. It’s hard enough to find locally produced food within convenient walking distance of downtown Bangor, and this move will make it harder. For the last few years, the twice-monthly indoor winter farmers market has been at the Sea Dog restaurant, steps from the heart of downtown.

The new location isn’t walkable from anywhere. (I have the same problem with the Natural Living Center, way out on Stillwater Avenue. Everybody who shops there has to drive – as if “natural living” meant getting into a two-ton vehicle to haul a few pounds of organic vegetables.)

It’s too bad that the farmers market couldn’t find a more convenient place for its winter incarnation. I’ll miss it. But I’ll be back next season on Sundays when, for a few hours, a downtown parking lot gets put to better use.

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