Henry Garfield

Green Means More Than Grasping at Straws

Hank Garfield

A silly meme on Facebook – a paper straw in a plastic wrapper titled “The Green movement in a nutshell” – got me thinking about my own environmentalist leanings, and my commitment to not owning a car.

Growing up on the Maine Coast gave me an environmental consciousness I never thought of as political. I instinctively pick up trash and recoil at litter, much of which includes non-recyclable plastic. But while a ton of straws can break a camel’s back, we aren’t going to save the planet by focusing on minutiae like straws. 

What do straws have to do with cars? They both kill turtles, for one thing. But cars do a whole lot more damage than that. Aside from the thousands of people killed yearly in crashes, motor vehicles contribute to a long laundry list of insults to the global ecosystem. They burn finite fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases. They necessitate the construction of acres of parking lots, which radiate heat back into the atmosphere, eliminate wetlands, and pollute reservoirs with run-off. They encourage the development of car-centric suburbs with huge per-capita carbon footprints. They foster graveyards of spent tires and dead vehicles that continue to pollute years after they stop moving.

Although I consider myself an environmentalist, I stopped owning cars for none of those reasons. I stopped owning cars because they cost too much money. I resented the idea that I needed a car at my service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There are plenty of cars around. Surely I could find one to use when I needed to, without the economic onus of owning one.

The past 17 years have vindicated this conviction. I now have a savings account instead of a monthly car payment and an ongoing insurance policy. I don’t waste precious minutes of my life sitting in traffic jams. On foot, on a bicycle, or on a bus, I’m healthier and happier than I would be seething and swearing at people from behind a windshield.

It hasn’t come without cost, or without compromises. I have had to adjust my lifestyle and change some habits. I leave ample time to get to the places I need to go, and I sometimes don’t get to other places I want to go. For most of those years, I’ve lived with someone who owned a car. Four months ago, we became a no-car household.

So far, we’ve managed. We did not visit family for Thanksgiving, and we have not yet needed to take the dog to the vet. Have you ever noticed that almost all veterinarians are way out on the edge of town? In October we rented a car and the three of us went to the coast for a weekend, but we can’t jump up and do that on the spur of the moment.

It isn’t only veterinarians. Hardware stores are hard to find anywhere outside of Lowe’s and Home Depot, always built where it’s hard to get to other than by car. The buses stop running before many people get out of work. To live without a car in a small city like Bangor, far from any major metropolitan center, is to endure a multitude of inconveniences.

Are the inconveniences worth the rewards? In my case, the answer was, and is still, “Yes.” But I don’t need a car to get to and from my primary job, and I do much of it on-line. It’s a 15-minute walk to downtown and an even shorter walk to a corner convenience store. Renting a car works out to about a hundred dollars a day, which seems like a lot until you consider that the average annual cost of owning a car is $10,000, equal to 100 car rentals.

I’m lucky, in that I can choose not to own a car. Many don’t have that choice. They either can’t afford one, or can’t drive one, for physical or other reasons. Life is even more inconvenient for them.

Cars are a convenience, and an environmental disaster. Hence the conundrum: how does an environmentally responsible citizen retain the convenience while reducing the harm? Many people are choosing to go electric.

Electric cars are marginally better for the environment, as this article from the New York Times details. But they require lithium and cobalt mining, which aren’t any kinder to the planet than oil rigs and refineries. They will not stop suburban sprawl or the hollowing out of small business districts in favor of outlying big-box stores with massive parking lots.

If we are to be serious about our stewardship of the planet, as I believe we must be, then we can do better than to substitute one environmental disaster for a slightly lesser one. Electric cars won’t do a whole lot of good if we use them the way we use gas-powered cars now.

Instead, we can invest in comprehensive public transportation, promote pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods with a mixture of business and residential use, and incentivize development on a human rather than an automotive scale.

Why do you get a straw when you order a glass of water at a bar, anyway? You can drink it just fine without one. Owning a car should not be a necessity. Entrenched interests make it feel like one. We must work toward a world in which alternative choices are equally appealing.

Pro-Choice on Transportation

Hank Garfield

Recently I rented a car, and temporarily rejoined the American car culture. I needed to get to Waterville, Augusta, and the Blue Hill peninsula, all within the span of a few days. I picked up the car at Bangor International Airport at noon on Monday with the promise to return it at the same time Friday.

Every time I pull out of a rental car lot, I realize that most of the people I know do this every day. They get in the car and go somewhere. Driving is as much a habit to most Americans – and certainly most Mainers – as my morning coffee is to me. 

But this time around, another thought kept vying for attention, and it was this: “Why do I have to do this by car? Why aren’t there any other options?”

Waterville is 60 highway miles from Bangor, Augusta 20 miles beyond that. Why isn’t there a train? Why is there hardly any bus service at all? (Waterville is served by Greyhound, and Augusta by Concord Coach. Trips are infrequent. It is not possible to travel round-trip between Bangor and Waterville in the same day.)

The Blue Hill peninsula is made up of small towns connected by rural roads that I know intimately. It’s where I grew up, and where I survived my teenage driving adventures (not everyone was so lucky). There was no public transportation then, and there’s precious little now. We lived like the characters in Richard Hooker’s M*A*S*H Goes to Maine:

            Laurie’s niece, Nancy Barnes, knew that it’s quicker to drive four miles in the area of Eagle Head than to make a phone call, so she jumped into her car, drove to the home of Tony Holcombe, found him mowing his lawn and gave him the word. Tony responded by mounting his station wagon and driving to Nancy’s house with all the enthusiasm, if not the skill, of Stirling Moss.

That’s the Maine I remember from my childhood (though I had to Google Stirling Moss.) In Blue Hill we had a name for new arrivals from larger places: Straphanger. Sometimes it was shortened to just “Strap.” But the reference was clear: people on public buses sometimes stand, and hang onto a strap. Blue Hill had no public buses.

Maine once had much more robust public transportation than it does now. The Automobile Age killed most of it off. But consider this: the roots of the car culture don’t go that deep. Interstate 95 north of Augusta is younger than I am. It hasn’t long been possible to blast from Bangor to Waterville in under an hour. Now people do it every day, to the point where the proliferation of cars and trucks threatens the ecosystem, the economy, and our quality of life. But it’s going to be hard to convince the lifelong car owner that maybe there’s a better way. It took a lot to convince me.

Nonetheless, it’s imperative that we try. Cars are choking the planet. The average worker, when liberated from the obligation of car ownership, has thousands more dollars annually to spend on more sustainable and economically beneficial goods and services. But public transportation always faces the same Catch-22: More people would use it if service were more frequent, but governing bodies don’t want to ramp up service until more people use it.

I turned in the car on Friday and took the bus home. You have to call the dispatcher because the airport isn’t on the Community Connector’s regular route. Still, I was glad to be free of the car – a white Kia with a sloped back and blind spots that could touch 90 miles an hour on the Interstate before I even noticed. Everyone was going at least 75. We live such frantic lives.

It had rained on the coast and I brought back the car filthy but full, sixty dollars and change for all the gas I used, at four-something a gallon. People are grumbling about gas prices. What they should be upset about is not having the choice to spend the money on bus or train fare instead.

Collateral Damage

Hank Garfield

It’s winter where I live, in the northeast corner of the United States, and for the past few weeks, most of the streets have been bracketed by high snowbanks. The plows have made the roads passable, but the same cannot be said for the sidewalks, which on many mornings freeze into something resembling a luge run with lumps. For those of us who walk, this presents a stark choice: risk a broken ankle, or walk on the street and take our chances with the cars.

A Maine winter streetscape
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Among other things, Covid-19 curtailed our addiction to driving. People worked from home and didn’t go out as much. This resulted in a steep reduction in the total miles Americans drove in 2020 and 2Car021, and could have been a silver lining to all of this. One might expect to see a corresponding decrease in road deaths – but in fact, the opposite happened. People drove less, but the number of car crash deaths went up. 

Why? What’s going on here?

The statistics are particularly grim for pedestrians and cyclists, the most vulnerable users of our public roads. One theory blames the super-sizing of American vehicles. Hummers and behemoth pickup trucks may give the driver a feeling of tank-like invincibility, but they can wipe out a pedestrian like a cargo ship running down a sailboat. The hoods of some of these vehicles are as high as the heads of the people crossing the street in front of them. A person in a wheelchair is practically invisible.

Combine that with the still-prevalent roads-are-for-cars get-out-of-my-way attitude of too many drivers, and the overall disintegration of civility in our public discourse, and you have a recipe for disaster. 

It’s not just drivers who are acting out. Every day we read about fights on airplanes, assaults on health care workers, screaming school board meetings. 

Is it really surprising that some drivers might vent their pandemic frustrations by driving too fast and too aggressively on less-crowded roads? Decades of macho automobile advertising have marginalized non-drivers, and taught generations of drivers to view pedestrians and cyclists as at best nuisances and at worst collateral damage. Government and business have piled on with practices that favor drivers: free parking, lack of walking city centers and communities, anemic public transportation, and poor sidewalk maintenance.

To be fair, drivers have legitimate concerns. It IS hard to see a dark-clad pedestrian at night, and it IS easier to keep a well-traveled roadway clear of ice than a sidewalk. Potholes ARE a problem and need to be fixed. But those of us on foot and bicycle help pay for the roads with our tax dollars, too, and we are coequal users of this public resource. It is high time for public policy and public behavior to reflect this.