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

A Bus to Brooklin

Hank Garfield

I took a bus to Brooklin. Not Brooklyn, New York, which has hundreds of buses, but Brooklin, Maine, which has one. My challenge was to get from Bangor, where I live, to my family’s home at the end of Naskeag Point, without using a car. It CAN be done. Here’s how.

You have to get up early, and get to the Odlin Road park-and-ride lot by 5:30 on a Friday morning. The Jackson Lab bus runs five days a week, year-round. It transports employees to and from the Jackson Lab facilities in Ellsworth and Bar Harbor. But it’s also open to the general public, and they will drop you off anywhere along the route. It leaves promptly at 5:30 and seconds later hits Interstate 395 and is on its way.

To get to Brooklin, you have to take this bus to Ellsworth and get off somewhere close to downtown to meet a second bus. It runs only on Fridays, but also year-round, and serves Surry, Blue Hill, Deer Isle, Stonington, Sedgwick, and Brooklin. The cost for the whole one-way trip from Bangor is nine dollars.

Both buses are run by Downeast Transportation, based in Ellsworth. A complete schedule of their routes is available at the Bangor Transit Center, and online.

But the bus doesn’t stop at the Transit Center. I called the day before to make sure that both buses carry bicycles and to verify the schedule, and at 4:55 Friday morning, I set off by bicycle from my house in the dark. I had timed the ride a few days earlier and confirmed that I could do it in a comfortable 20-25 minutes without busting my aging butt. The sky was brightening when I wheeled into the park-and-ride. The bus was already there. I guess someone had told the driver to expect me, because she made a note on a clipboard and said she could drop me off at the Mill Mall in Ellsworth, where a short bike ride would take me to City Hall to meet the second bus.

The first bus was about half-full, about fifteen passengers. A few brought blankets. It was a quiet ride. The sun came up around quarter to six. At 6:03 I disembarked at the Mill Mall, right in front of Sylvie’s Café. “Open at 4:30 AM” said the sign in the window. I enjoyed a smashing breakfast and listened to a group of truck drivers at another table discuss various routes they took between Maine and Florida. At the lumberyard across the street, people were already moving stuff around with forklifts. The day had begun. 

My bus left at 7:20. I didn’t need a ticket or a transfer or anything. It was all very informal. I paid the cash fare in Bangor, and the driver in Ellsworth knew I was coming. Not surprising, really, since I was the only passenger.

“You do know we go to Stonington first, right?” the driver said. I replied that I did, and that I was in no hurry. It was a fine day for a scenic tour of the Blue Hill peninsula, overcast but clear. The view from Caterpillar Hill, virtually unchanged since my childhood, stretched to the horizon, the Deer Isle bridge in the foreground illuminated by a ray of sunlight.

An older woman and man got on in Stonington. They were regulars; the driver knew them by name and picked them up at their houses. He picked up another two passengers in North Deer Isle, and after a short delay for a jackknifed truck, he dropped me at the Brooklin General Store right on schedule at 9:20. I had another three miles to go, but that’s why I have a bicycle.

This may seem like a long and convoluted way to get to a destination that’s only an hour and a half away by car, but nine bucks is less than the cost of gas to get there, not to mention all the costs associated with car ownership. When my family moved to Blue Hill in my tenth year, we were called “straphangers” – people who rode buses and hung onto straps – and it was not a term of endearment. Public buses were foreign and therefore suspicious, From Away.

The bus seems to be used primarily by senior citizens on the peninsula to get to Ellsworth and back, though the driver said he sometimes picks up kids going to school. It makes a return trip in the afternoon, reversing the morning route. Thus a person could board the bus in Brooklin at 9:20, spend a few hours in Ellsworth, and be home by early afternoon. 

Though public transportation in this rural area may be skeletal, that this service exists at all is something of a minor miracle. And it is imperative that those of us who believe in the future of public transportation use what’s here in the present, however infrequent or inconvenient. It may take longer and require some planning, but it demonstrates demand, and paves the way for more and better transportation options down the road.

Old, Entrenched Attitudes Die Hard in Car-Centric California

Hank Garfield

This is what we’re up against. 

Fox News recently gave the top of its Web page to an opinion piece by San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, under this screen-spanning headline: “San Diego wants to tax people out of their cars and into public transportation.”

My first reaction: It’s about time.

Desmond lives in Oceanside, California. I used to live there. He came to North San Diego County in 1984, a year after I did. Companies were investing in new business parks near freeway ramps and surrounded by parking lots. The area had a decent bus network, and a commuter train along the coast. But little effort was made to integrate the outlying business parks with public transit, giving all those employees little choice but to drive, and exacerbating already bad traffic congestion.

After sixteen years, I gave up on California and moved back to Maine, a place with much less traffic but also fewer options. In both places, the so-called choice of driving is, for many people, hardly a choice at all.

The language Desmond uses is telling. He charges that San Diego’s most recent regional transportation plan is “designed to make driving so expensive that you succumb to public transportation.” I’m sorry, but “succumb”? It’s usually the other way around. People who want to use public transit are forced to reluctantly buy a car. For most of my adult life, I “succumbed” to the idea that car ownership was a necessity of modern American life. Every government transportation incentive over the past fifty years has encouraged driving and discouraged the development of alternatives.

Desmond trots out several dated and debunked arguments to prop up his position:

Desmond: “Government agendas should not be used to change behavior by taxing us into fixed-rail trains and buses. Instead of changing behavior, government entities should incentivize technology and innovation.” 

Slower Traffic: When Maine passed its returnable bottle law in 1976, people stopped throwing bottles from car windows. The bottles and cans that lined many roadways disappeared within months. Littering was already illegal, but sometimes people need a nudge from government to do the right thing. 

History abounds with examples of this, from civil rights to workplace safety to smoking in bars and restaurants. Governments pass laws, which in turn influence behavior. It’s ridiculous to argue that government should not and cannot be an agent for positive change.

Desmond: “Government should embrace what most people are already choosing, and make it cleaner, safer, and more efficient.  The people have spoken, they choose freedom of movement and not broken promises or additional taxes.”

Slower Traffic: This is a classic circular argument. People choose cars because government transportation policy encourages this choice and punishes others. Car owners are, as the late Jane Holtz Kay documented in her 1997 book Asphalt Nation, “responding to a rigged market… price supports for ring roads, beltways, and free parking… taxes and infrastructure that promote far-flung highways and suburban homes.” If the nearest grocery store is more than a mile away, and your job is in a business park surrounded by parking lots but nowhere near a bus stop, are you really making a free choice, or bowing to a de facto requirement? The people have not “spoken.” They’ve obeyed.

Desmond: Who will this affect the most? The lowest income earners. The math is simple, those that earn less will pay a disproportionately higher percentage of their income to get to where they need to go.

Slower Traffic: Lower earners already pay a larger percentage of their income on transportation. This has been true for decades. It’s still cheaper to take the bus than to own a car. Shifting money from the car system to public transit via taxation can help level the playing field. But this is exactly what Desmond opposes. 

Our motor vehicles and their ancillary services are a cumulative environmental disaster. Cars aren’t going away anytime soon, but doesn’t it make sense to soften their impact, on both the climate and our overall quality of life? I don’t know anyone who enjoys the stop-and-go freeway traffic I lived with every day in California. San Diego has, to its credit, expanded its trolley system, and built a downtown baseball stadium that replaced the one in the conglomeration of freeways and parking lots of Mission Valley. (Full disclosure: I voted for the ballpark, which passed 60-40% in 1998.) 

Public transportation is the future. But people like Desmond seem determined to stand in the way.