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If the United States and Canada were one country, there would likely be no story here. That new mighty economic powerhouse, the United States and Provinces of North America, would have long since thrown up a highway across the swath of Maine that lies on a line between Halifax and Montreal, and the trucks would even now be rolling through the night.
But an international border sits astride the route. That complicates things. It’s been there for a long time, and it isn’t going away without anything short of an invasion. No one expects that, of course. Canadians and Mainers are friendly neighbors, frequent cross-border tourists, and, increasingly, business partners. The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has made it easier to buy and sell goods across the border, and the strong Canadian dollar has brought visitors flocking to Bangor and other Maine cities.
“Five years ago, when you went to the mall, you wouldn’t see any Canadian plates,” says Candy Guerette, executive director of the Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce. “That’s changed, to say the least.”
At the same time, increased border security since the September 11 attacks has meant longer waits to enter the United States, for both Canadians and returning Americans. Differing regulations in the two countries remain a hindrance to over-the-road commerce.
Now, a new bridge and Cianbro’s privatized east-west highway proposal (see Peter Vigue interview, Nov. ’07) have people on both sides talking about a new era of cross-border cooperation.
Striding past and future
What we now know as “the border” began as the vague line that separated northern Loyalists from the American Revolutionaries who had thrown off British rule. But the division was never as clear-cut as a line on a map, or which side of a river someone decided to settle. Families lived, and still do, in two countries. Brisk commerce flowed across the imaginary line, in both directions. In some ways, little has changed over the centuries.
From 1604, when a boatload of Frenchmen spent a deadly, disastrous winter on Saint Croix Island, surviving only with the help of the nearby Passamaquoddy Indians, residents along both sides of Maine’s inverted U-shaped border with Canada have worked together whenever regional concerns seemed more pressing than national interests in distant capitals. This concept of cooperation is the driving idea behind Atlantica, an imaginary eco-state being promoted by businesspeople from Halifax to Buffalo. (See “Shortcut to Prosperity,” Nov. ’05.)
“It’s just a border,” says Miles Theeman, CEO of Affiliated Healthcare Systems, and Bangor cochair of the binational group Access Atlantica, which promotes closer business and cultural ties along the Bangor-Saint John corridor. But is it?
“I go to Canada every day when I’m home,” says 18-year-old Kelsey Roy of Madawaska, a freshman at Eastern Maine Community College. When she and her friends go out to a movie, it’s in Edmundston, New Brunswick, on the other side of the St. John River. Kelsey sees a Canadian dentist and buys prescription medication in Edmundston, and many Madawaskans cross the border for food.
“The Americans go to Canada for groceries, and the Canadians come to the U.S. for gas,” Roy says. “The convenience store down the street is always packed with Canadian cars.”
She says she’s never waited more than 20 minutes on the bridge, and going through customs usually takes no longer than a minute or two. “I’m on a personal basis with most of the border people,” she says. “Right after 9-11 they were really strict—they’d check every person. Now it’s more back to the way it was before.”
Weighty Restrictions
But crossing the border isn’t so easy if you’re driving a truck. Especially a truck hauling 50 tons of Canadian beer to thirsty American consumers.
“I’ll give you a scenario,” says Nancy Thorne, Theeman’s Access Atlantica counterpart in Saint John, New Brunswick. “Say, the Moosehead Brewery, which is based in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, wants to export beer to Boston and New York. They have to truck it up around Maine, west to Montreal, and down through Ontario and Detroit. It’s absolutely ridiculous. And the reason they’re doing it is the weight restrictions in Maine.”
Ah, yes, the weight restrictions. Everybody wants to talk about them. “The first issue we need to tackle is the weight limits,” says Candy Guerette.
Under federal law, trucks weighing more than 80,000 pounds are barred from the newer section of Interstate 95 from Augusta to Houlton. The Canadian provinces to our north and west, however, allow over 108,000 pounds, and to the south, both New Hampshire and Massachusetts allow 99,000 pounds. Yet when they enter Maine, all of these vehicles are forced to exit I-95 between Augusta and Houlton. These larger trucks instead rumble across Maine’s state roads and city streets. The issue made the news last year when a woman was killed after getting off a BAT bus at the intersection of State Street and Broadway in Bangor. Another accident involving a truck took the life of a 17-year-old girl near Hampden Academy in 2007.
“They’re using Route 46 through Holden, too, which is an unbelievably unsafe road. It’s hilly and curvy, and it goes right past an elementary school,” says Sandy Blitz, executive director of the East-West Highway Association, a nonprofit group that has been studying binational transportation issues for several years. “It’s another accident waiting to happen.”
Blitz explains that the current interstate weight restrictions are a carryover from the construction of the federal interstate highway system under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The legislation called for a weight limit of 80,000 pounds on all interstates constructed after that time. On all other roads, weight restrictions are set by the state, and Maine’s weight limit is 100,000 for state highways. Hence, larger trucks traveling through Maine have little choice but to drive through residential neighborhoods.
Influential politicians in some neighboring states have been able to get waivers for sections of newer interstate highways, but no luck so far for Maine. Senator Judd Gregg [R-New Hampshire], a powerful member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, attached a provision to an omnibus spending bill last year that now allows trucks of up to 99,000 pounds to use Interstates 93 and 89 in his home state.
“He didn’t tell anybody he was doing this,” Blitz says. “It would have been nice if he had talked to his neighbors.”
Congressman Mike Michaud has joined South Carolina Congressman Harry Brown in introducing legislation that would provide waivers in both states similar to New Hampshire’s. Michaud is also exploring ways of using NAFTA to get the limits raised, according to a press release from the Mid-Maine Chamber of Commerce. But opposition in Congress remains strong.
Until something changes, federal law allows the modern, six-axle 100,000-pound trucks to use the older section of I-95 built before Eisenhower, but not the newer section from Augusta to Houlton. This creates a bottleneck, which truckers must either negotiate via secondary roads (at the cost of time, efficiency, and safety) or avoid—by driving the longer, all-Canadian route around the northern upthrust of Maine.
“There’s a per-hour cost to operating a truck,” Blitz explains. “Let’s say it’s a hundred bucks. If you save two hours by going through Maine, you’re saving two hundred bucks on that one trip, each way.” But being unable to add 10,000 pounds to your load is not worth the $200 savings. Hence, the work-arounds.
In fact, a glance at a map shows that a fast route across central Maine, should weight restrictions be lifted, would save substantially more than two hours. Anecdoctal evidence confirms it. “I have family in Ottawa,” says Thorne, who owns a Century 21 Real Estate franchise in Saint John. “When we visit them, we always go through the States. It’s a much shorter distance. We save at least four hours.”
Peter Vigue, CEO of Maine’s Cianbro Corp., has proposed a limited-access highway, which would be built with nongovernment funds and supported by tolls, and would not be bound by the Eisenhower era weight restrictions. This east-west highway proposal has been kicked around by politicians and businesspeople in Maine and Atlantic Canada in one form or another for decades. A new bridge at the Calais-St. Stephen crossing, due for completion in late 2008, may breathe even more new life into an old idea.
Locals on both sides will tell you that a third bridge between their communities is sorely needed. The Calais crossing is the fifth busiest on the 5,500-mile U.S.-Canadian border, including the Alaska section. Traffic into the States in the summertime can back up for more than two hours. As bad as this is for tourists, it’s worse for those residents who live in one country and work, shop, or visit friends and family in the other.
“People may not realize it, but this is the first new border crossing in 30 years,” Thorne says. She believes tourism confirms the need: “Saint John was the only Canadian city east of Kingston, Ontario, to have a significant increase in tourism last year,” she says.
Construction on the $120 million new bridge began in April. When completed, traffic from Canada will enter the U.S. near the Calais Industrial Park. A connecting road will join with U.S. Route 1 for six miles, then with Route 9, the main east-west route.
The proposed east-west highway would roughly follow the existing course of Route 9, crossing I-95 near Old Town. From there, the road would angle to the northwest, running through Dover-Foxcroft, and reentering Canada at Coburn Gore, a lonely outpost at the end of Maine’s Route 27 on the border with Quebec.
Business leaders in both countries see the highway—or some variation thereof—as integral to the “Atlantica” concept. “Providing access through the state of Maine will create commerce,” Theeman claims. “Not only will trucks use [the highway], but tourists will use it, too, and business will spring up to accommodate them.”
But environmentalists, free-trade skeptics, and even a few economists question whether the road would be the boon its backers claim. Others fear for the small towns along the route. “It isn’t going to generate increased economic vitality,” former Green Party gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Carter told the Kennebec Journal in 2004. “It will undermine businesses [in the towns] through which the road might pass, because at every exit there will be McDonald’s and Cumberland Farms, and local businesses will suffer.”
A group of Canadian citizens has formed the Alliance Against Atlantica, which staged protests at the June 2007 Atlantica Conference in Halifax and the previous year’s meeting in Saint John. Environmental and labor organizations in Canada say that a road network will steer more inexpensive Asian goods into the U.S. at the cost of increased greenhouse gases, and weakened unions and minimum-wage protection.
A study prepared by the Maine DOT and the Maine State Planning Office, published in September 1999, estimates that an east-west highway would create, at most, 3,700 new permanent jobs by the year 2030. The report also warned that “a new four-lane alignment east of Bangor could cause significant bypass effects of Route 1 commercial activity in the coastal communities between Bangor and Calais.” Vigue’s recently proposed private limited-access highway removes the trucks without rerouting the tourists.
The architects of the border weren’t thinking about tourists or trucks. They weren’t thinking much about overland travel at all. Most large-scale commerce in those days involved bodies of water, and rivers—the St. John, the St. Croix, the St. Lawrence—as the main avenues to get people and things from coastal ports to inland areas.
Rail lines across Maine linked Atlantic Canada with Montreal in the 1880s (see sidebar), but shipping was still king well into the second half of the 20th century. In 1959, the U.S. and Canada opened the St. Lawrence Seaway, which allowed oceangoing freighters to travel as far west as Duluth, Minnesota. (Ironically, U.S. participation in the project was approved by President Eisenhower, whose interstate system would pave the way for the age of big trucks.)
The subsequent growth of Halifax as a deep-water commercial port, coupled with the growth of the trucking industry, has business leaders on both sides of the seaway dreaming of new possibilities. “Working together as a region makes us a huge trading bloc internationally, because of the population,” Guerette says.
Some 400,000 people, she notes, live in the international region roughly bookended by Bangor and Saint John. It’s about a three-hour drive from one city to the other, less than the distance from Bangor to Boston.
And though the border is a fact of life, people on both sides are beginning to realize that international differences can be less important than regional common interests. “Historically, the relationship between the two cities was mainly symbolic,” Guerette says. “Now it’s becoming more of a real economic opportunity.”
Signs of that newfound spirit abound. Bangor Hydro Electric Company and New Brunswick Power Transmission have connected new cross-border power lines and are building more. Earlier this year, Husson College received a $1.5 million gift to operate Unobskey College in Calais as a satellite campus for students in Maine and Canada. Future transportation options include not just highway projects but possible cooperation between the airports in the two cities.
“For so long, this region has looked south for business investment,” Guerette says. “Now we’re looking to the Maritimes. They want to have a foothold here, and Bangor makes sense. We’re all related. I have relatives in Quebec and the Maritimes, and so do a lot of other people around here. It’s like working with family.”
But an international border sits astride the route. That complicates things. It’s been there for a long time, and it isn’t going away without anything short of an invasion. No one expects that, of course. Canadians and Mainers are friendly neighbors, frequent cross-border tourists, and, increasingly, business partners. The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has made it easier to buy and sell goods across the border, and the strong Canadian dollar has brought visitors flocking to Bangor and other Maine cities.
“Five years ago, when you went to the mall, you wouldn’t see any Canadian plates,” says Candy Guerette, executive director of the Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce. “That’s changed, to say the least.”
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At the same time, increased border security since the September 11 attacks has meant longer waits to enter the United States, for both Canadians and returning Americans. Differing regulations in the two countries remain a hindrance to over-the-road commerce.
Now, a new bridge and Cianbro’s privatized east-west highway proposal (see Peter Vigue interview, Nov. ’07) have people on both sides talking about a new era of cross-border cooperation.
Striding past and future
What we now know as “the border” began as the vague line that separated northern Loyalists from the American Revolutionaries who had thrown off British rule. But the division was never as clear-cut as a line on a map, or which side of a river someone decided to settle. Families lived, and still do, in two countries. Brisk commerce flowed across the imaginary line, in both directions. In some ways, little has changed over the centuries.
From 1604, when a boatload of Frenchmen spent a deadly, disastrous winter on Saint Croix Island, surviving only with the help of the nearby Passamaquoddy Indians, residents along both sides of Maine’s inverted U-shaped border with Canada have worked together whenever regional concerns seemed more pressing than national interests in distant capitals. This concept of cooperation is the driving idea behind Atlantica, an imaginary eco-state being promoted by businesspeople from Halifax to Buffalo. (See “Shortcut to Prosperity,” Nov. ’05.)
“It’s just a border,” says Miles Theeman, CEO of Affiliated Healthcare Systems, and Bangor cochair of the binational group Access Atlantica, which promotes closer business and cultural ties along the Bangor-Saint John corridor. But is it?
“I go to Canada every day when I’m home,” says 18-year-old Kelsey Roy of Madawaska, a freshman at Eastern Maine Community College. When she and her friends go out to a movie, it’s in Edmundston, New Brunswick, on the other side of the St. John River. Kelsey sees a Canadian dentist and buys prescription medication in Edmundston, and many Madawaskans cross the border for food.
“The Americans go to Canada for groceries, and the Canadians come to the U.S. for gas,” Roy says. “The convenience store down the street is always packed with Canadian cars.”
She says she’s never waited more than 20 minutes on the bridge, and going through customs usually takes no longer than a minute or two. “I’m on a personal basis with most of the border people,” she says. “Right after 9-11 they were really strict—they’d check every person. Now it’s more back to the way it was before.”
Weighty Restrictions
But crossing the border isn’t so easy if you’re driving a truck. Especially a truck hauling 50 tons of Canadian beer to thirsty American consumers.
“I’ll give you a scenario,” says Nancy Thorne, Theeman’s Access Atlantica counterpart in Saint John, New Brunswick. “Say, the Moosehead Brewery, which is based in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, wants to export beer to Boston and New York. They have to truck it up around Maine, west to Montreal, and down through Ontario and Detroit. It’s absolutely ridiculous. And the reason they’re doing it is the weight restrictions in Maine.”
Ah, yes, the weight restrictions. Everybody wants to talk about them. “The first issue we need to tackle is the weight limits,” says Candy Guerette.
Under federal law, trucks weighing more than 80,000 pounds are barred from the newer section of Interstate 95 from Augusta to Houlton. The Canadian provinces to our north and west, however, allow over 108,000 pounds, and to the south, both New Hampshire and Massachusetts allow 99,000 pounds. Yet when they enter Maine, all of these vehicles are forced to exit I-95 between Augusta and Houlton. These larger trucks instead rumble across Maine’s state roads and city streets. The issue made the news last year when a woman was killed after getting off a BAT bus at the intersection of State Street and Broadway in Bangor. Another accident involving a truck took the life of a 17-year-old girl near Hampden Academy in 2007.
“They’re using Route 46 through Holden, too, which is an unbelievably unsafe road. It’s hilly and curvy, and it goes right past an elementary school,” says Sandy Blitz, executive director of the East-West Highway Association, a nonprofit group that has been studying binational transportation issues for several years. “It’s another accident waiting to happen.”
Blitz explains that the current interstate weight restrictions are a carryover from the construction of the federal interstate highway system under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The legislation called for a weight limit of 80,000 pounds on all interstates constructed after that time. On all other roads, weight restrictions are set by the state, and Maine’s weight limit is 100,000 for state highways. Hence, larger trucks traveling through Maine have little choice but to drive through residential neighborhoods.
Influential politicians in some neighboring states have been able to get waivers for sections of newer interstate highways, but no luck so far for Maine. Senator Judd Gregg [R-New Hampshire], a powerful member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, attached a provision to an omnibus spending bill last year that now allows trucks of up to 99,000 pounds to use Interstates 93 and 89 in his home state.
“He didn’t tell anybody he was doing this,” Blitz says. “It would have been nice if he had talked to his neighbors.”
Congressman Mike Michaud has joined South Carolina Congressman Harry Brown in introducing legislation that would provide waivers in both states similar to New Hampshire’s. Michaud is also exploring ways of using NAFTA to get the limits raised, according to a press release from the Mid-Maine Chamber of Commerce. But opposition in Congress remains strong.
Until something changes, federal law allows the modern, six-axle 100,000-pound trucks to use the older section of I-95 built before Eisenhower, but not the newer section from Augusta to Houlton. This creates a bottleneck, which truckers must either negotiate via secondary roads (at the cost of time, efficiency, and safety) or avoid—by driving the longer, all-Canadian route around the northern upthrust of Maine.
“There’s a per-hour cost to operating a truck,” Blitz explains. “Let’s say it’s a hundred bucks. If you save two hours by going through Maine, you’re saving two hundred bucks on that one trip, each way.” But being unable to add 10,000 pounds to your load is not worth the $200 savings. Hence, the work-arounds.
In fact, a glance at a map shows that a fast route across central Maine, should weight restrictions be lifted, would save substantially more than two hours. Anecdoctal evidence confirms it. “I have family in Ottawa,” says Thorne, who owns a Century 21 Real Estate franchise in Saint John. “When we visit them, we always go through the States. It’s a much shorter distance. We save at least four hours.”
Peter Vigue, CEO of Maine’s Cianbro Corp., has proposed a limited-access highway, which would be built with nongovernment funds and supported by tolls, and would not be bound by the Eisenhower era weight restrictions. This east-west highway proposal has been kicked around by politicians and businesspeople in Maine and Atlantic Canada in one form or another for decades. A new bridge at the Calais-St. Stephen crossing, due for completion in late 2008, may breathe even more new life into an old idea.
Locals on both sides will tell you that a third bridge between their communities is sorely needed. The Calais crossing is the fifth busiest on the 5,500-mile U.S.-Canadian border, including the Alaska section. Traffic into the States in the summertime can back up for more than two hours. As bad as this is for tourists, it’s worse for those residents who live in one country and work, shop, or visit friends and family in the other.
“People may not realize it, but this is the first new border crossing in 30 years,” Thorne says. She believes tourism confirms the need: “Saint John was the only Canadian city east of Kingston, Ontario, to have a significant increase in tourism last year,” she says.
Construction on the $120 million new bridge began in April. When completed, traffic from Canada will enter the U.S. near the Calais Industrial Park. A connecting road will join with U.S. Route 1 for six miles, then with Route 9, the main east-west route.
The proposed east-west highway would roughly follow the existing course of Route 9, crossing I-95 near Old Town. From there, the road would angle to the northwest, running through Dover-Foxcroft, and reentering Canada at Coburn Gore, a lonely outpost at the end of Maine’s Route 27 on the border with Quebec.
Business leaders in both countries see the highway—or some variation thereof—as integral to the “Atlantica” concept. “Providing access through the state of Maine will create commerce,” Theeman claims. “Not only will trucks use [the highway], but tourists will use it, too, and business will spring up to accommodate them.”
But environmentalists, free-trade skeptics, and even a few economists question whether the road would be the boon its backers claim. Others fear for the small towns along the route. “It isn’t going to generate increased economic vitality,” former Green Party gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Carter told the Kennebec Journal in 2004. “It will undermine businesses [in the towns] through which the road might pass, because at every exit there will be McDonald’s and Cumberland Farms, and local businesses will suffer.”
A group of Canadian citizens has formed the Alliance Against Atlantica, which staged protests at the June 2007 Atlantica Conference in Halifax and the previous year’s meeting in Saint John. Environmental and labor organizations in Canada say that a road network will steer more inexpensive Asian goods into the U.S. at the cost of increased greenhouse gases, and weakened unions and minimum-wage protection.
A study prepared by the Maine DOT and the Maine State Planning Office, published in September 1999, estimates that an east-west highway would create, at most, 3,700 new permanent jobs by the year 2030. The report also warned that “a new four-lane alignment east of Bangor could cause significant bypass effects of Route 1 commercial activity in the coastal communities between Bangor and Calais.” Vigue’s recently proposed private limited-access highway removes the trucks without rerouting the tourists.
The architects of the border weren’t thinking about tourists or trucks. They weren’t thinking much about overland travel at all. Most large-scale commerce in those days involved bodies of water, and rivers—the St. John, the St. Croix, the St. Lawrence—as the main avenues to get people and things from coastal ports to inland areas.
Rail lines across Maine linked Atlantic Canada with Montreal in the 1880s (see sidebar), but shipping was still king well into the second half of the 20th century. In 1959, the U.S. and Canada opened the St. Lawrence Seaway, which allowed oceangoing freighters to travel as far west as Duluth, Minnesota. (Ironically, U.S. participation in the project was approved by President Eisenhower, whose interstate system would pave the way for the age of big trucks.)
The subsequent growth of Halifax as a deep-water commercial port, coupled with the growth of the trucking industry, has business leaders on both sides of the seaway dreaming of new possibilities. “Working together as a region makes us a huge trading bloc internationally, because of the population,” Guerette says.
Some 400,000 people, she notes, live in the international region roughly bookended by Bangor and Saint John. It’s about a three-hour drive from one city to the other, less than the distance from Bangor to Boston.
And though the border is a fact of life, people on both sides are beginning to realize that international differences can be less important than regional common interests. “Historically, the relationship between the two cities was mainly symbolic,” Guerette says. “Now it’s becoming more of a real economic opportunity.”
Signs of that newfound spirit abound. Bangor Hydro Electric Company and New Brunswick Power Transmission have connected new cross-border power lines and are building more. Earlier this year, Husson College received a $1.5 million gift to operate Unobskey College in Calais as a satellite campus for students in Maine and Canada. Future transportation options include not just highway projects but possible cooperation between the airports in the two cities.
“For so long, this region has looked south for business investment,” Guerette says. “Now we’re looking to the Maritimes. They want to have a foothold here, and Bangor makes sense. We’re all related. I have relatives in Quebec and the Maritimes, and so do a lot of other people around here. It’s like working with family.”
