The New Bangor Transit Center

Hank Garfield

The new downtown bus station in Bangor’s Pickering Square is almost finished. I’ll be writing more on this soon, but to celebrate, I’m revisiting a post from January 2020, just before the city council vote that set this all in motion, interspersed with photos from the construction process. This is proof positive that positive things can happen when a determined group of citizens makes a concerted effort to improve their community.

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It’s coming down to crunch time for those of us who ride the bus. The Bangor City Council will vote on Monday, January 27 whether or not to build a central depot for the Community Connector bus system in Pickering Square.

I’m in favor of it, and so were three-quarters of the attendees at a council workshop on January 13. The importance of the issue was underscored by the overflow crowd, which could not fit into the room.

Those in opposition tended not to be bus riders, and I will repeat the invitation I offered at that meeting: take a day, or a week, or whatever time you have, and use the system before trying to redesign it.

Opponents of the Pickering Square hub have put forth a series of shifting positions. There was the so-called “Joni Mitchell option” proposed a couple of years ago to pave the square and put up a parking lot. Some of the same people are now advocating for a green space and pedestrian mall. Others want to wait years and possibly decades to build a multi-modal transportation “hub” far from the center of Bangor’s radiating street design.

And despite two commissioned studies that affirmed Pickering Square as the optimal spot for a bus hub, a minority of those in attendance, and a minority on the council, continue to call for more information before moving forward.

This should be recognized for what it is: a delaying tactic, until some hypothetical future study, at further cost, yields the recommendations they want.

The idea that the city should gather more detailed information on current ridership, for example, seems reasonable on the surface. But it is somewhat beside the point. Any plan will need to include not only the people who ride the bus now, but also those who can be convinced to ride an improved bus system in the future. Later hours – the next big hurdle – will help with this. But so will a central, comfortable, and above all, visible downtown bus hub. It’s time to get it done.

Cities all over the world have found that reducing the number of cars in their downtown areas improves the business climate as well as the physical climate. Bangor needs to join this growing movement.

I was glad to see at the recent meeting that many business owners in downtown Bangor get this. The bus is a built-in delivery system for customers and employees. One bus can obviate the need for as many as 30 parking spaces. A bus makes less noise, takes up less space, and creates less pollution than the number of cars required to transport an equal number of passengers.

I’m not against cars. A certain number of people need to have them, for various reasons. What I am against is the unchecked proliferation of cars, the official encouragement of driving at the expense of other forms of transportation, and the tendency of municipalities to design and implement infrastructure for the near-exclusive benefit of drivers and car owners.

We are living in the Late Automobile Age. Many Americans, especially the young, are beginning to realize that individual car ownership is not the necessity we have been told that it is. But the drumbeat from the automobile and advertising industries has been so relentless over the past several decades that it is difficult for some people to imagine a different future.

It will take time to loosen the grip of the car culture on the American way of life. But lasting, fundamental change happens in increments. It happens in small steps, like electing representatives to city councils who understand the liberating potential of public transportation. Building a bus hub in Pickering Square is but one small step in an ongoing process. But it is a step in the right direction.

The Fading Glow of Baseball

Hank Garfield

It’s that time of year when I write the second of my semi-annual baseball pieces: one for Opening Day, one for the World Series. This year’s entrants will be determined in the coming days. I was born and spent my first nine years in Philadelphia, and I lived 16 years in and around San Diego, so it’s a safe bet I’ll be rooting for the National League team. 

But I probably won’t watch much of it. I’ve followed the World Series since at least 1965, but in the past few years I’ve drifted away from baseball. The last time the Red Sox won, in 2018, I was in Bulgaria, and had to content myself with following it on the Internet. I watched the Nationals-Astros Series in 2019, when the visiting team won every game. It was a great Series. But I haven’t watched a minute of a Series since.

Covid-19 was part of the reason. We lost two-thirds of a season. And we freed our household from cable television, of which sports are an expensive and exasperating part. Baseball’s better on the radio, anyway. If I really want to watch a game, I can walk to a bar.

In the United States we blow sports all out of proportion, of course. A quarterback’s divorce gets more attention than the meltdown of a British prime minister. Former athletes run for, and frequently win, political office, with no more qualification than their trophies. Television revenue, owner profits, player salaries and ticket prices are all astronomical. The sports industry, like the automobile industry, is a colossus.

They’re both subsidized, too. Cities are built for cars, and city officials spend tax money to build venues for their teams so they won’t move to another city. I have some qualms about using public money to boost hugely profitable businesses. Nonetheless, in 1998 I voted Yes, along with 59.5% of my fellow San Diegans, on the referendum that created Petco Park.

The ballpark is something of a miracle. Formerly, the Padres played their home games in a soulless football stadium amid an asphalt jungle of freeways and parking lots. But at the turn of the millennium, in car-crazed Southern California, we built a ballpark for pedestrians and public transportation. Petco Park is downtown, served by the trolley and buses, in a walking neighborhood next to the bay. It opened in 2004, the year of the Red Sox redemption. By that time I had moved Back East. I’ve never attended a game there, but I’m still proud of my vote.

Sadly, though, I can’t muster the enthusiasm for baseball that I once had. Four Red Sox championships have taken the angst out of the equation, but I continued to watch for entertainment. Then managers started removing pitchers from shutouts in the sixth inning, and every mediocre hitter started swinging for the fences.

I didn’t see the marathon game between Houston and Seattle, won finally by the Astros, 1-0 in 18 innings. I read some of the comments afterward. The Mariners were the home team, which meant that if they scored, they won. Inning after inning, players took turns trying to hit the heroic, game-ending, walk-off homer – when all they needed was a Maury Wills run: a bunt single, a stolen base, a productive out to the first-base side, and a sacrifice fly. 

But I’m getting into the weeds here. It’s sad that big league baseball has degenerated into a slugging contest. A game critics have always derided as boring has become, in fact, boring. 

Worse, it has become unessential.

In 2004, the Red Sox surged into the World Series, and George W. Bush went up for re-election against John Kerry. Like many of my friends, I wanted the Red Sox to win and Bush to lose. What if only one of those things could happen? This was an earnest debate, and not a few of us picked the Red Sox. They hadn’t won in 86 years. Bush would be gone in four.

That sentiment, though widely shared, was a luxury we don’t have today. Another election is coming up, and it’s way more important than who wins the World Series.

Recent Adventures in Public Transportation – 3

Hank Garfield
Rockland Harbor

I drove to Rockland and back in one day recently. I could have taken the bus. But the only bus on the route leaves Bangor at 7 a.m. The return trip leaves Rockland at 3:30 p.m. Even in September, that’s much too early to leave the coast on a sunny day with the afternoon southerly sea breeze kicking up. 

Once upon a time, there were two daily buses serving the coastal route from June to October. You could leave Bangor at seven, spend the whole day on the water, have a nice dinner in Rockland, and catch the late bus at 9:30. Or you could choose to leave Bangor in the late morning or Rockland in the late afternoon. You had options. But the pandemic changed all that. 

I can’t blame Concord Coach, really. They’re just trying to stay in business at an uncertain time for public transportation. I have noticed that ridership on the route has increased. The buses are fuller now that the number of daily trips has been halved. But that doesn’t account for all of the increase. People are discovering that it’s a good deal. The buses are punctual and comfortable. The price is comparable to the cost of the gas you would otherwise use, without the work of driving. 

The primary problem of public transportation in the United States is that we cling to a business model for it. People want buses and trains to turn a profit, or at least break even. They forget that the single most subsidized form of transportation in this country is the private automobile.*

The expectation of profit has left us with a few bus lines that provide skeletal service between Bangor and Portland, Bar Harbor and the Downeast coast, and Aroostook County. But there is no interconnected network, though the different bus lines do their best to co-ordinate schedules. It’s not unusual for people traveling by bus to be stranded in Bangor overnight.

Business, by and large, does well with concrete commodities created in competition. Build a better product; people buy it; the company profits; everybody makes money. But services – education, health care, police protection, public transportation – deal in a different coin. They work best when cooperative and connected.

Tax dollars spent on public transportation more than pay for themselves in the overall economy. Public transportation gets people to jobs and hobbies and medical appointments and vacations. We need more of it.

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* – There is a raft of literature on this. I have cited some of it in previous posts, and I don’t need to repeat the arguments here. Construction and maintenance of parking lots and parking spaces is just one example of welfare for cars.