public transportation

Recent Adventures in Public Transportation – 2

Hank Garfield

To get from Bangor to Rockland without a car, I use the Concord Coach bus, which leaves Bangor at 7:00 every morning. On weekdays, Bangor’s Community Connector bus gets me to the depot on Union Street in plenty of time for a cup of coffee and a doughnut.

I remember a time when coffee and doughnuts, along with orange juice and the Bangor Daily News, were available to bus passengers at no extra charge. Sadly, in part due to inane expectations that public transportation should somehow “pay for itself” (as if cars do), those small perks are no longer available. But there is a Dunkin’ Donuts within easy walking distance of the bus station, and on a recent morning after buying my ticket, I sallied forth.

The usual line of cars idled at the drive-thru. But the lobby was closed. A hastily scrawled sign apologized for the staffing shortage, assuring me that the drive-thru window and something called “on the go” were still available.

“What’s “on the go?” I asked the man in the car leaving the drive-thru

“It’s an app. You have to download it on your phone.”

“To get a cup of coffee?”

Now, I may not own a car, but I’m not a Luddite. I do own a smart phone, and it even has a few applications on it. (No one uses the full word, much as Dunkin’ Donuts has become simply “Dunkin’”.) But I had cash in my pocket and a bus to catch. In disgust, and with the faint beginnings of a caffeine withdrawal headache, I walked back to the depot.

What a sad commentary on these impersonal times in which we live. Service was available for cars and for cell phones, but not for human beings without a vehicle or the proper electronic accessory.

I don’t really have to point out a moral here, do I? Why not close the drive-thru when short of staff and require customers to use the lobby? It might take them a few more minutes, but so does walking or riding a bus to work, yet both are eminently more pleasurable that driving. And why are we all in such a hurry, anyway? Slow down and smell the coffee.

Use What’s Already Here

Hank Garfield

One thing I haven’t done in the 21st Century is finance a car.  My Ford Aerostar van was already paid off when I hauled two kids, a dog, a cat, and a U-Haul trailer from California to Maine in 1999, and moved back to the state where I grew up. There was one more vehicle: a piece of junk I bought from my son when he went to college and for which I handed him $600 in cash. For my six hundred bucks I got about three months of driving. That was in 2006; I haven’t owned a car since.

Thus I have no personal experience with what it costs to buy and keep a car today. I suffered a bit of vicarious sticker shock recently when I picked up the AAA Explorer magazine and read an article about car loans.

Apparently, there’s something called the 20/4/10 rule. Make a 20% down payment, pay off the loan in four years, and keep the cost of payments and other car expenses below 10% of your monthly household income.

According to the article, the average price of a new vehicle is now north of $47,000. Part of this is because Americans love to drive big pickup trucks and SUVs even as they complain about the cost of the gas they guzzle. Financing a $47,000 vehicle by the 20/4/10 guidelines would mean a down payment of $9,400 and a monthly car payment of $846 at 3.85% interest for 48 months.*

Yikes. Several years ago, AAA estimated the average annual cost of owning a car at $9,000 per year. It has surely gone up since then, as these numbers would seem to indicate. Giving up car ownership is like earning a $10,000 raise. So why aren’t more people doing it?

“I couldn’t live without my car.” You will hear variations on this theme whenever you present the idea that car ownership is a choice, not a requirement. “How will I shop for groceries, or take my dog to the vet, or get my guitars and amps from home to gig and home again? How will I get to work? What if one of my kids gets sick, or my aging parents have an emergency?” All these and more are valid concerns for individual car owners who have bought into a car-dependent life. It’s not a question of money; it’s a feeling that there are no alternatives.

But when you peel back the assumptions underlying our mass car culture, you begin to realize that it doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t all need cars all the time. Why can’t cars be time-shared, like condominiums? Why do veterinarians have to set up practice on the outskirts of town? Why can’t employers incentivize carpooling and the use of public transportation? Why can’t we use the gas tax to finance more buses and bus drivers? Why can’t we build walkable, interconnected communities instead of strip malls, suburbs, and parking lots?

Maine is rural, and rural residents balk at paying taxes for public transportation they don’t use. But city taxpayers finance roads so that rural commuters can drive thirty or more miles to work. 

Yes, Maine needs more public transportation. But the political problem is that the majority of Maine voters don’t use it. That’s why it’s important to use what’s already here, even if it’s inadequate. Think of your car as a last, not first, choice. Go to that Sea Dogs game by Concord Coach bus and skip the parking. Use their once-a-day coastal bus service to attend one of the many summer events in the Rockland area. Take the Community Connector to work, especially if your employer incentivizes it, as mine does.

There is a huge groundswell of people who want to throw off the yoke of car payments and car ownership. But many of them feel trapped by the infrastructure we’ve created that caters to the automobile rather than the human beings who, often reluctantly, drive them.

By establishing that people will use public transportation even when it’s difficult, we can demonstrate the demand that will make it easier in the future.

* – All figures are from Drive Smart: The Perils of Protracted Loans, by Peter Bohr, AAA Explorer, page 10, July/August/September 2022 issue.

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.