I sing the praises of the Concord Coach bus system. It gets me from Bangor to Rockland and back at times of day that suit my schedule. The bus trip takes only a few minutes longer than the drive. And the price — $36 round trip – is reasonable.

Every day at 7 a.m., and also at 11 a.m. in the summer, two buses leave the Concord Coach station on Union Street in Bangor. One is the express to Portland and Boston, with a single stop in Augusta. The other is the coastal route, which serves Rockland and several other towns. The express is often packed and never less than half-full. As I write this, I’ve just left Bangor on the 11 o’clock coastal bus with three other passengers.

The bus always picks up more passengers in Belfast, Camden, and at stops in Rockland and beyond. Most of them are bound for Portland or Boston, like their counterparts who boarded the express in Bangor. But I often wonder why this part of the route is so thinly used. Why don’t more Bangorians visit the midcoast by bus?

I think it’s because they don’t think about it. Or if they do, driving seems more straightforward and cost-effective. We are conditioned to think this way by the car culture we all grew up in, and the economic decisions we make reflect those values.

But we Americans live in a rigged market, where every incentive favors driving. It’s not this way everywhere, as I learned during my time in Bulgaria.

The driving distance between Bangor and Rockland is 63 miles. The driving distance between Blagoevgrad and Sofia is 105 kilometers, or 65 miles – the same, for the purpose of the rough comparison I will do here. The time it takes to drive is likewise similar.

A bus ticket from Bangor to Rockland costs $18 if you buy a round-trip ticket; the one-way fare is $20. The return ticket is good for a year. A ticket from Blagoevgrad to Sofia is 10 leva, or about $6, with no open-ended round-trip discount. The price of gas in Maine is currently around $2.50 per gallon. The price of gas in Bulgaria is about 2.2 leva per liter, or about $4.70 (in U.S. dollars) per U.S. gallon.
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Let’s say you own a car that gets 25 miles per gallon. A driver in Bangor is going to spend six dollars for the gas to get to Rockland. (Of course, there are other expenses to driving, but that average American car owner, who is already absorbing those costs, thinks primarily about the cost of gas.) A driver in Bulgaria will spend the equivalent of around $11 to drive the same distance.

In Maine, the bus ticket costs three times the price of the gas to drive the same route. In Bulgaria, the gas costs twice as much as the bus ticket. So the average American weighs the costs and says, “I’ll just drive,” while the average Bulgarian makes the opposite choice. It helps, too, that the Bulgarian buses run every hour rather than just twice a day.

I can also tell you that in both Sofia and Blagoevgrad the bus station is right next to the train station. It’s easy to transition from one form of transportation to another. The Concord Coach station in Bangor is close to the airport, but not walkable, and there’s no regularly scheduled shuttle. It requires a cab. And the local Community Connector bus system stops running fifteen minutes before the evening buses from Rockland and Boston pull in, leaving passengers hung out to dry. The Greyhound stop, over the horizon in Hermon, is even worse.

The Rockland bus station is at the ferry terminal, in the center of town. But most of the Concord Coach stops aren’t nearly as accessible. The stop for Camden, for example, is at a convenience store (convenient for drivers) two miles out of town.  It’s one of the least friendly bus stops I’ve ever seen. The store is often closed when the bus arrives. One can only take from this that Camden doesn’t want, or at best, doesn’t care about, visitors who arrive by bus.

Obviously, the smart thing to do would be to raise gas taxes and put the money into improved and expanded public transportation. But it’s a tough sell in a rigged market. Even American liberals, who express concern about climate change and environmental degradation and sprawl, become protective of their car culture when it impacts their daily lives. Why shouldn’t they? It’s all they’ve ever known.

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I came home after nine months in Bulgaria, to find that some things have changed and some have stayed the same.

There’s a new parking garage on Main Street, further obstructing the public’s view of the public waterfront. But the Community Connector, Bangor’s public bus system, still stops running at six in the evening. And though friends tell me that there has been progress on this front, I’m left wondering why it takes only nine months to put up a parking garage, but more than a decade to extend bus hours into the evening.

Bulgaria is a former Soviet Bloc communist country whose present economy is about the same size as Maine’s. Blagoevgrad has twice Bangor’s population, but because it was built more vertically than horizontally, its geographic footprint is similar. Like Bangor, it serves as a regional center for surrounding small towns. Yet local buses run well into the evening, seven days a week. Bangor’s bus service doesn’t run at all on Sundays.

If an impoverished Eastern European country can offer comprehensive public transportation to its citizens, surely the Bangor area can do it as well. I’ve lived in Bangor since 2006. In that time, I’ve hard a lot of talk about the obvious need for extended evening bus hours. I’ve also witnessed the construction of three parking garages, all on bus routes.

Parking garages are at least marginally better than the sprawling parking lots spawned by the shopping mall craze of the 1970s, from which downtowns across America are still struggling to recover. But they are still eyesores, monuments to a car culture we must begin to move beyond.

The problem with parking garages, in addition to obstructing the view, is that their mere existence incentivizes driving and car ownership. Incentives ought to run the other way, encouraging people to leave their cars at home, or to downsize from two vehicles to one, or to even give up car ownership altogether. This requires a commitment to better public transportation, by both private and public sectors.
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The greatest “green” challenge of this century is to coax people out of their cars – not everybody, but enough to make a significant difference in the demand for oil and city real estate. The single most significant green initiative Bangor could undertake for the immediate future would be to extend the bus hours into the evening, so that people could get to and from work and attend events with some flexibility.

Looking farther forward, commuters from Winterport, Hermon, Eddington, and Orrington currently have no realistic options other than driving their own cars to work. Bus service should eventually be extended to these outlying communities. In Bulgaria you can get almost anywhere on a bus. Many people drive and own cars there, but it has not been made a de facto requirement by the elimination of all alternatives.

But too many well-intentioned Americans have bought into the mindset of car-as-necessity, and we have allowed our transportation system to be designed around it. And too many well-meaning environmental groups continue to dance around the central issue of automobile overkill. Bicycle paths and walking trails are fine things, as far as they go, but when you drive your bike to a trailhead to ride along a trail carved out of the woods, how much are you really doing for the environment?

People will argue that this all costs money: more buses, more drivers, publicity and community outreach. But all over the world, wherever public transportation is made readily and easily available, people use it. There is a growth curve, to be sure, but as people discover how much money, time, and aggravation they can save by becoming less reliant on their cars, public transportation always becomes more popular over time. It’s an investment – and far less costly and much more sustainable in the long run than continuing to subsidize cars and car infrastructure.

So let’s get it done, Bangor, sooner rather than later. Find the funds to extend the Community Connector hours into the evening. After that, think about Sunday service and extended routes. Perhaps a fleet of mixed-sized vehicles, smaller buses for less traveled routes and less busy times, would be a way to allay some of the initial cost. Get more employers on board with a system of parking offsets and free passes for employees who take the bus to work. If we are to be serious about saving the environment, we need to get serious about public transportation.

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