Maine

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

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. 

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.