Buses and Trains

The Bangor Community Connector, and others

All My Uber Trials

Hank Garfield

Why do people think Uber is simple to use and the public bus system is complicated?

It’s exactly the opposite.

Recently, I decided to up my car non-ownership game and sign up for Uber. I’ve had great success living in Bangor, Maine for the past 17 years without owning a car. I sing the praises of the Community Connector bus system. I rejoiced with my fellow riders when the downtown Bangor Area Transit Center opened in December 2022. But the buses run only during the day, and they can’t go everywhere. It’s tough to get a taxi in Bangor, for whatever reasons. So, I thought I’d give Uber a shot.

I downloaded the app onto my smartphone, no problem. I was a bit surprised that it didn’t ask for my credit card information. Friends assured me that I would be asked to enter it the first time I used the service. After that, they said, the service would be seamless.

I wasn’t at home the first time I needed a ride. I rarely need rides from home, as I live within walking distance of town and the Transit Center. I lined up a ride, and sure enough, the app asked for my credit card info, which I dutifully plugged in. But then it wanted to send two micro-payments to my credit card. I was to report the exact amounts of the payments for verification. The only problem was that I don’t do banking on my cell phone, and I was miles from my laptop.

Fine, I thought. The next time, I would schedule the ride in advance, from home, where I could access my credit card account. (None of these steps were spelled out in advance.) However, the first two times I tried this, I got a message: “pickup location unavailable.” I have yet to take my first ride.

All this is preamble to an observation that gets more and more cemented in my psyche with each passing day.

When I posted the first two sentences of this piece on Facebook, my friend Félix, who lives in Bulgaria, replied (and I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting him here): “the public bus system is a public service and Uber is a twisted organization that tries to make their greed and consumerist anxiety look like sociality and coolness.”

As the Brits say, spot on.

I was trying to help Lisa get to and from a business on the other side of town. After striking out with Uber, I walked to the Transit Center, where a dispatcher (whose name I don’t know but who deserves praise) helped me plan the most convenient route. The bus driver was also helpful, showing us where we would need to be, and at what time, for the return trip.

There is no one to call at Uber for such assistance. And this is par for the course when a private company tries to masquerade as public service. When was the last time you called any private enterprise and did not have to navigate a series of automated prompts before connecting with a human being?

The bus system isn’t perfect. It needs longer hours. Paying passengers taking multiple rides in one day can’t use the transfer system for brief stops. Still, I hate to criticize it, because despite its imposed limitations, it works well. Anybody who can read a printed schedule can use it, and it’s inexpensive and reliable.

The great lie of the post-Reagan era is that the private sector is more efficient than the public. The focus of public services is convenience for the end-user. The focus of private enterprise is convenience (and profit) for the owners of the business. This is happening across society. To see a doctor, you used to make an appointment and show up. Now you must navigate a maze of pre-registration, pre-pre-registration, on-line verification, and electronic confirmation. To get a cup of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, you have to “interface” with a touch-screen menu when the guy who’s going to pour your coffee is standing right there, getting an order ready for the drive-thru. And don’t get me started on self-checkout at the grocery store.

More and more, the end-user (the customer) is required to navigate steps in the service process that should be handled by competent, knowledgeable staff. Rather than hire and train and pay employees, companies are increasingly putting the customer last, by making them take on more of the tasks they are supposedly paying for.

Don’t get me wrong: business does many wonderful things. But public services, like education, health care, and especially public transportation, aren’t among them.

A Ballpark and a Bus Depot

Hank Garfield
The author at a recent Dodgers-Padres game in San Diego

I wish I’d kept the comment on the Bangor Daily News website about my piece last December extolling the new Bangor Transit Center. The commentator predicted that the place would be trashed within a month and turn Pickering Square into an eyesore.

Six months later, the station looks as good as the day it opened. There’s barely a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. There are, to be sure, cameras and “No Loitering” signs – and, importantly, staff presence during operating hours and periodic police attention around the clock. But the functional beauty of the station doesn’t seem forced. It works, because people want it to work.

Last month I left Maine for the first time since Covid to visit San Diego, where I spent the Eighties and Nineties raising children and following Tony Gwynn’s baseball career. In 1998 the city held a referendum on construction of a new baseball stadium for the Padres, who until then had been playing their home games in a football stadium with all the soul of a barracks.

Along with 59% of my fellow San Diegans, I voted Yes, because I thought the plan for the new park was visionary, especially for car-obsessed Southern California. Petco Park is right on the trolley line, walking distance from the waterfront, hotels, and restaurants. I finally got to see a game there this spring. The Dodgers beat the Padres, 2-1.

What do a baseball stadium and a bus station, in two cities of vastly different size at opposite ends of the country, have in common?

More than you might think. But I want to focus on two primary themes: Both ballpark and bus depot contribute toward curbing the ubiquity of the car in American transportation. And they each validate the idea that ordinary citizens can achieve real results through representative democracy.

In 1983 when I arrived in San Diego, the football Chargers ruled the sports landscape. The Padres were an afterthought, an expansion team (born 1969) that was never any good. They had to play in the Chargers’ stadium, in Mission Valley, surrounded by freeways and asphalt expanses suited to tailgating but not to a day at the ballpark. Now the Chargers are in Los Angeles, and the Padres are the only game in town. 

The newspapers and television stations were playing it up: the first visit by the Dodgers since the Padres bounced them from the playoffs last year. But I didn’t expect to see a sea of Dodger blue marching through the Gaslamp Quarter an hour before the ballgame with horns and flags and all. A railroad rivalry has evolved since the new ballpark opened. Petco Park is a short walk from the Santa Fe Depot, and hundreds of Dodger fans ride the regular Amtrak trains down from Orange County and LA to see a game, or a weekend series. That didn’t happen in Mission Valley. It was all cars.

The ballpark has transformed the Gaslamp Quarter. The hours before the game reminded me of Kenmore Square in Boston. San Diego has always been a city of neighborhoods. Now it has the neighborhood ballpark it deserves.

Bangor, despite its small size, is a hub. It’s a service center for outlying towns. Traffic arteries lead outward to become roads: Hammond Street to Hermon, Union Street to Levant, Broadway to Dover-Foxcroft, State Street to Old Town. At the center of the hub lies Pickering Square. It’s clearly the logical place for a bus depot. As I wrote in December, the central location is not only most convenient, it sends a powerful signal about the centrality of public transportation in the area.

But not everyone wanted it there. Several people with influence in the community spoke out against it. City Council meetings were packed with people on both side of the issue. The final vote was a 5-4 cliffhanger.

Nonetheless, today there is a bus station. It’s clean, warm, and well-lit, and after years as a dream and six months as reality, it’s a success story about citizen involvement. We elected people to the City Council who supported public transportation; we presented the case for a central bus station to the full Council, and a majority determined that we had the stronger argument. Isn’t that exactly how the process is supposed to work?

Not everybody in San Diego wanted the city to spend tax dollars to build a new ballpark for the Padres, either. But I would argue that it has already paid for itself several times over. It’s the centerpiece of a bustling business area that isn’t dominated by cars. That by itself is worth the price of admission. The sunset and the breeze off the bay are just bonuses.

And I’m tired of hearing about the elitist, out-of-touch “they” who purportedly control our democratic institutions. Ballpark and bus depot reveal this as a lie. Both are shining examples of what “we” citizens can do, using the mechanisms of politics.

 If I walk by the Bangor Transit Center and see a rare piece of litter, I’ll pick it up and put it in a trash can. I suspect a lot of other people who attended those meetings do the same. We may have each played a small part, but we all feel some pride of ownership. At the game in San Diego, I felt something of the same thing.

Bangor’s new bus depot

Across the Great Divide

Hank Garfield
Amtrak’s Southwest Chief in Raton, New Mexico

My previous out-of-town trip on public transportation was to Brooklin, Maine, at the end of a long peninsula about 50 miles from Bangor. My next trip was a little longer.

I hadn’t been all the way across the country on Amtrak since my kids were small and I could take one for half price and the second for free. That was in the 1990s, when I lived in San Diego and owned a car. The routes haven’t changed. I’ve changed. The young father has become a senior citizen, on his way west to visit his adult daughter.

Julian, California is a small town more than four thousand feet up in the mountains east of San Diego. It’s where my kids were babies and attended their first schools. Small towns in California aren’t all that different from small towns in Maine. Julian is as insular and isolated as Brooklin. And, like Brooklin, it’s served by public bus only on Fridays.

To cover the 3,400 miles between my home and my daughter’s, I used a combination of buses and trains, resorting to a car only at the very beginning and end of the trip. It’s a mile, give or take, from my house to the Concord Coach depot on Union Street. A bus leaves from there promptly at 7 AM every day, stops in Augusta and Portland, and arrives at South Station in Boston by 11:30. The train to Chicago leaves at 12:50. The area around the station looked bad and smelled worse. There was a lot of construction going on and no place to buy a newspaper. The news stand in the lobby had been ripped out. I finally found a Boston Globe at a store several blocks away. The train to Chicago left right on time.

All the way across the country, in fact, my trains ran on time. We left Albany more than half an hour late, but made up the time over a rainy night across New York and Ohio and got into Chicago ten minutes early. I got the full four-hour layover between trains, enjoying a leisurely lunch, a walk along Lake Michigan, and another protracted search for a newspaper. I guess people don’t read physical newspapers much anymore. A pity, since on a train a newspaper is much more useful than a computer.

Three days riding in coach is more comfortable at thirty-five than it is at sixty-five, but a train is still ten times better than a bus and twenty times better than a plane. Beds on the train are several times more expensive than coach tickets, and many of the sleeper units don’t have windows. The coach seats are nicely spaced, the trains are usually about half full, there’s a club car and an observation car, and the train makes ample stops for passengers to get out and walk around. 

A train allows you to see things you don’t see from the highway: a horse rolling on its back in a yard, the backsides of industrial parks, the extensive wetlands of central Massachusetts, flooding along the mighty Mississippi and its tributaries, the high plains of New Mexico across which Clint Eastwood drifted on horseback with his poncho and guns. There’s a stop in La Plata (rhymes with “See ya latah”), a Missouri town in the middle of nowhere, smaller than either Brooklin or Julian, where nonetheless a dozen passengers disembarked.

We arrived in Los Angeles, as in Chicago, ten minutes ahead of schedule. A recent mudslide had imperiled a section of track near San Clemente, so it was a train to Irvine, a bus to Oceanside, then back on the train to San Diego. (Amtrak comped this part of my trip, which, together with my senior discount, brought the total cost down under $200.) I got off the train in Solana Beach, dipped my feet in the Pacific, then took a local bus to Escondido and another bus up into the hills to Ramona, just twenty-two miles from Julian. My daughter met me there and drove me the rest of the way to her home in the mountains.

The return trip was a red-eye flight to Boston, the T to North Station, the Downeaster train to Portland, and good old Concord Coach back to Bangor. 

If you’re thinking about a similar trip, be sure to research the available routes in advance. Leave plenty of wiggle room to make connections. It’s not always evident how to get from one service to another – Amtrak to local bus, for example. I looked up my whole potential itinerary on line before I left Maine. Bring something to read during the inevitable waits. And don’t compare the travel times to driving or flying. You might not get there as fast, but you will arrive in a better state of mind.

The Mighty Mississippi near Fort Madison, Iowa