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In Bangor’s Broadway Park, a small plaque embedded in a rock between the sidewalk and the street marks the route of the Old Veazie Railroad, whose tracks were laid in 1836. Trains ran between Bangor, Orono, and Old Town, and across the Penobscot River to Milford. Stand on the spot today and all you will see are motor vehicles: cars, trucks, SUVs, the occasional ambulance. No sign of the tracks remains. Only the Stillwater BAT bus, passing once an hour in each direction, reminds you that you are standing on one of the oldest public transportation corridors in the country.
Stand there too long, however, and you might find yourself short of breath, especially on a warm day. The particulate pollution to which the automobile contributes won’t sting your eyes like the smog in Los Angeles, but it can cause health problems for vulnerable people like senior citizens and young children.
Environmental groups and green-minded citizens decry the ill effects of widespread private automobile ownership. Chris Balish, author of How to Live Well Without Owning a Car, believes “the automobile may be the single worst environmental catastrophe in history.” But it’s not just the environment that suffers from America’s addiction to cars. We suffer as we sit in traffic jams, troll for an elusive parking space, and drive to the grocery store instead of walk to the neighborhood market. It’s no wonder that an increasing number of Mainers looking to reduce their personal carbon footprints and gain a saner, healthier quality of life are turning back to what was once a mainstay in the Veazie railroad days: public transportation.
Very quietly, and with almost no publicity, public transportation in the greater Bangor area is steadily improving. The Bangor Area Transit (BAT) bus system carried 715,632 riders in 2006, the latest year for which figures are available—a 50% increase in use over five years. The Jackson Lab in Bar Harbor has partnered with Downeast Transportation to create a commuter service that eases traffic congestion on Mount Desert Island. The seasonal Island Explorer enables tourists to enjoy Acadia National Park without a vehicle, and in peak summer months it is the busiest public transportation service in the state. Other bus lines connect Bangor with the Midcoast, Waterville and Augusta, Aroostook County, and Atlantic Canada.
Every morning at just after seven o’clock, two sleek, bullet-blue buses begin boarding outside the Concord Trailways depot on Union Street in Bangor, near the Airport Mall. On a typical day you will find several dozen people waiting in and around the small building, sipping complimentary coffee and orange juice, munching free doughnuts, scanning the headlines in the morning paper. Almost all of them will board the first bus, which is headed for Portland and then to Boston’s South Station and Logan Airport. The second bus, which stops in Searsport, Belfast, Camden, Rockland, Waldoboro, Damariscotta, Wiscasset, Bath, and Brunswick before pulling into Portland nearly two hours behind the first one, might have one passenger, sometimes two or three, sometimes none at all. Getting a window seat is never a problem.
“If you just traveled between Bangor and Rockland, you’d wonder how we stayed in business,” says Tony Hoff, manager of the Bangor terminal. “That’s not where the bread and butter of the route is.”
Indeed, the bus picks up handfuls of passengers as it makes its way along the coast—a few in Belfast, a few more at the Route One convenience store that serves both Camden and Rockport. By the time it leaves the Rockland ferry terminal, the 54-seat bus might be as much as one-third full, depending on the season. Bowdoin College in Brunswick is a popular stop when school is in session.
“It’s very seasonal, and somewhat sporadic,” Hoff says of the coastal route’s ridership. Few Bangor area residents seem to know that for less than the price of gas, you can spend a day in Belfast, Camden, or Rockland without worrying about traffic or parking. Buses leave Bangor at 7:15 and 11 a.m.; return trips leave Rockland at 4:15 and 9:30 in the evening. A round trip to Rockland is just $28; to Camden, $25; to Belfast, $18. En route, you can read, watch a movie, or gaze at the scenery. “It works beautifully for people who live in Bangor and want to spend a day on the coast,” Hoff says.
The express service to Boston has proven both popular and profitable. Hoff notes that the cost of a bus ticket is “cheaper than what parking alone would cost in Boston, never mind the gas.” Concord Trailways offers free parking for up to two weeks in the lot behind the terminal.
The Greyhound bus terminal in downtown Bangor has been in operation continuously since 1952, according to agent Paul Brountas. Vermont Transit Lines, owned by Greyhound, serves the cities between Bangor and Boston that Concord Trailways doesn’t: Waterville, Augusta, Lewiston, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The two bus lines work in cooperation. “We take their tickets, and they take ours,” Brountas says. The downtown station also links Bangor with Atlantic Canada via the Acadian bus. A Cyr bus, which travels to and from Aroostook County, makes stops at both Greyhound and Concord Trailways. West’s Transportation provides daily bus service to and from Ellsworth, Machias, and Calais.
But the heart of public transportation in and around Bangor is the network of bright red “BATmobiles” that serve Bangor, Brewer, Veazie, Orono, Old Town, and Hampden. According to Don Cooper, senior transportation planner for Bangor Area Comprehensive Transportation Systems (BACTS), more than 90% of the area’s population lives within three-quarters of a mile of a BAT route.
“The typical rider is a second wage earner in a household, who has a driver’s license, but the household only owns one vehicle,” Cooper says. “I suspect there are thresholds in the cost of running cars. There’s a point for every single family where it trips over to being more practical to use public transportation.”
A 2007 study commissioned by the nonprofit American Public Transportation Association concluded that a two-adult household saves an average of $6,251 year when one adult uses public transportation instead of a car to get to and from work.
The BAT system has been in existence since 1972. It’s funded through a combination of federal and state money, fare box revenues, advertising, and contributions from each of the six communities it serves plus the University of Maine. Single rides are a dollar; a book of five tickets costs $4. A monthly pass costs $40; a half-price pass is available to high school students. Through an agreement with the University of Maine, all students, faculty, and staff can ride free anywhere in the system.
BAT buses—which all run on biodiesel fuel—transport passengers six days a week, between six in the morning and six at night, on all routes except Hampden, which does not run on Saturday.
BAT supervisor Joe McNeil says that careful coordination of schedules and simplification of the fare structure have contributed to the system’s growing popularity. “The routes are designed so that people don’t have to wait a long time to make connections,” he says.
Designing an effective bus system to serve the needs of the greatest number of people is more complicated than most people think. And although the nine routes served by 17 buses (14 of which are in use during peak hours) manage to cover most of the area, gaps remain. “We’ve looked at trying to serve farther out on Broadway, including Bangor High School,” Cooper says. “We cannot get the buses out there and back on time.” Currently, the Center Street bus goes as far as the Broadway Shopping Center. Husson College is served by the connecting Mall Hopper route.
Timing is everything. Bad traffic patterns can cause lateness up and down the system, by forcing other buses to wait for connecting passengers. “Even a place that’s right on the route can be inaccessible because of the layout of the site,” McNeil says. To avoid problems in advance, BAT representatives “try to be involved in the planning stages of new development, like the new Shaw’s store being built on Stillwater Avenue. We’re already talking to the design engineers about a designated stop.”
The “spoke” design of the BAT system, in which bus routes converge in front of the Pickering Square parking garage, facilitates scheduling but can lengthen some trips, McNeil acknowledges. The Mall Hopper route was added a few years ago to allow passengers to travel between the Airport Mall, the Broadway Shopping Center, and the Bangor Mall without
transferring downtown. Planners are also looking at adding direct service at least once a day between the University of Maine and the Bangor Mall.
The Orono campus has 12,000 students, 2,500 employees, and 6,700 parking spaces, according to Alan Stormann, assistant director for parking and transportation. A yearly parking permit costs $50, which Stormann characterizes as “a pretty good deal when compared with other land-grant universities in New England.” By simultaneously giving away BAT rides and charging for parking, the university hopes to avoid the more expensive and less environmentally friendly option of building more parking spaces, Stormann says.
Additionally, the university encourages carpooling with designated no-cost parking spaces for employees who sign up for the program. Last summer, the university was named by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as one of the Best Workplaces for Commuters, an official designation that recognizes employers for reducing traffic congestion and related air pollution in their communities.
BAT buses all have bike racks, and the university encourages the use of bicycles through a fraternity-run network of “green bikes”—bicycles that have been either donated or abandoned, fixed up, and made easily identifiable by a coat of green paint. These can be borrowed and used at any time, and then simply left for the next user. The student government has also invested in two Zipcars, part of a nationwide time-share program in which users buy a membership and get a card that allows them access to the vehicle. There is no cost to the user beyond the membership and the price of gas. The program is entering its second semester at UMaine with mixed results. One of the cars ended up in the shop in December after a collision with a deer.
The chief complaint of students and other BAT users seems to be that the buses don’t run late enough. The last northbound bus on the Old Town route leaves Bangor at 5:15; the last bus to Bangor departs the university at 6:30. Miss them and you’re marooned. You’re also out of luck up at the Concord Trailways station, when the first bus coming back up the coast pulls in at 6 p.m.—15 minutes after the last BAT bus has left the nearby Airport Mall for downtown.
A survey of the system completed for BACTS in July 2007 by Tom Crikelear Associates of Bar Harbor reported that BAT passengers “expressed nearly unanimous support for service later in the evening.” The report discusses extending service to the University of Maine until 10:45 p.m., and to certain Bangor routes until 8:45 p.m. It also recommends a third bus on the Old Town route during the day to alleviate overcrowded buses—evidence that the university’s free bus pass program is working.
The Jackson Lab has made a similar commitment to encourage public transportation commuting, says Paul Murphy, general manager of Ellsworth-based Downeast Transportation. “They decided that their property was better suited to research facilities than parking lots,” he says. Buses now run between Ellsworth and Bar Harbor four times a day during the workweek. Lab employees receive discounted fares that are far less than the cost of gasoline. The buses make several stops in each town, and, like the BAT, are open to members of the general public.
Still, the Bangor metro’s public transportation picture remains an incomplete painting, with large stretches of bare canvas. Perhaps this is inevitable, given the region’s expansive geography and sparse population. There’s no way, for example, to take a bus to Dover-Foxcroft or Greenville, and if you wanted to travel by bus from Bangor to Quebec City—a five-hour drive—you would have to go through either Boston or Saint John, a process that could take days. And routes that are convenient for people traveling in one direction are not so usable for those going the other way. It’s easy for a Bangor-based magazine journalist to ride the bus down to Rockland and back for an interview, but a Rockland businessman with a midday meeting in Bangor can’t do the same thing, because there is no morning northbound (and no evening southbound) bus. The Cyr Aroostook County bus makes just one round-trip per day, and it begins and ends in Caribou.
So maybe while it isn’t possible for most of us in this neck of the woods to give up our cars completely, it is possible to use them less by taking advantage of what’s already here. “If you provide a service that’s convenient, easy to use, and more attractive than the automobile, people will use it,” says Murphy.
Think about this the next time you’re stuck in traffic, pumping gas, or looking for a place to park: Chances are, you could have taken the bus instead.
Stand there too long, however, and you might find yourself short of breath, especially on a warm day. The particulate pollution to which the automobile contributes won’t sting your eyes like the smog in Los Angeles, but it can cause health problems for vulnerable people like senior citizens and young children.
Environmental groups and green-minded citizens decry the ill effects of widespread private automobile ownership. Chris Balish, author of How to Live Well Without Owning a Car, believes “the automobile may be the single worst environmental catastrophe in history.” But it’s not just the environment that suffers from America’s addiction to cars. We suffer as we sit in traffic jams, troll for an elusive parking space, and drive to the grocery store instead of walk to the neighborhood market. It’s no wonder that an increasing number of Mainers looking to reduce their personal carbon footprints and gain a saner, healthier quality of life are turning back to what was once a mainstay in the Veazie railroad days: public transportation.
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Very quietly, and with almost no publicity, public transportation in the greater Bangor area is steadily improving. The Bangor Area Transit (BAT) bus system carried 715,632 riders in 2006, the latest year for which figures are available—a 50% increase in use over five years. The Jackson Lab in Bar Harbor has partnered with Downeast Transportation to create a commuter service that eases traffic congestion on Mount Desert Island. The seasonal Island Explorer enables tourists to enjoy Acadia National Park without a vehicle, and in peak summer months it is the busiest public transportation service in the state. Other bus lines connect Bangor with the Midcoast, Waterville and Augusta, Aroostook County, and Atlantic Canada.
Every morning at just after seven o’clock, two sleek, bullet-blue buses begin boarding outside the Concord Trailways depot on Union Street in Bangor, near the Airport Mall. On a typical day you will find several dozen people waiting in and around the small building, sipping complimentary coffee and orange juice, munching free doughnuts, scanning the headlines in the morning paper. Almost all of them will board the first bus, which is headed for Portland and then to Boston’s South Station and Logan Airport. The second bus, which stops in Searsport, Belfast, Camden, Rockland, Waldoboro, Damariscotta, Wiscasset, Bath, and Brunswick before pulling into Portland nearly two hours behind the first one, might have one passenger, sometimes two or three, sometimes none at all. Getting a window seat is never a problem.
“If you just traveled between Bangor and Rockland, you’d wonder how we stayed in business,” says Tony Hoff, manager of the Bangor terminal. “That’s not where the bread and butter of the route is.”
Indeed, the bus picks up handfuls of passengers as it makes its way along the coast—a few in Belfast, a few more at the Route One convenience store that serves both Camden and Rockport. By the time it leaves the Rockland ferry terminal, the 54-seat bus might be as much as one-third full, depending on the season. Bowdoin College in Brunswick is a popular stop when school is in session.
“It’s very seasonal, and somewhat sporadic,” Hoff says of the coastal route’s ridership. Few Bangor area residents seem to know that for less than the price of gas, you can spend a day in Belfast, Camden, or Rockland without worrying about traffic or parking. Buses leave Bangor at 7:15 and 11 a.m.; return trips leave Rockland at 4:15 and 9:30 in the evening. A round trip to Rockland is just $28; to Camden, $25; to Belfast, $18. En route, you can read, watch a movie, or gaze at the scenery. “It works beautifully for people who live in Bangor and want to spend a day on the coast,” Hoff says.
The express service to Boston has proven both popular and profitable. Hoff notes that the cost of a bus ticket is “cheaper than what parking alone would cost in Boston, never mind the gas.” Concord Trailways offers free parking for up to two weeks in the lot behind the terminal.
The Greyhound bus terminal in downtown Bangor has been in operation continuously since 1952, according to agent Paul Brountas. Vermont Transit Lines, owned by Greyhound, serves the cities between Bangor and Boston that Concord Trailways doesn’t: Waterville, Augusta, Lewiston, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The two bus lines work in cooperation. “We take their tickets, and they take ours,” Brountas says. The downtown station also links Bangor with Atlantic Canada via the Acadian bus. A Cyr bus, which travels to and from Aroostook County, makes stops at both Greyhound and Concord Trailways. West’s Transportation provides daily bus service to and from Ellsworth, Machias, and Calais.
But the heart of public transportation in and around Bangor is the network of bright red “BATmobiles” that serve Bangor, Brewer, Veazie, Orono, Old Town, and Hampden. According to Don Cooper, senior transportation planner for Bangor Area Comprehensive Transportation Systems (BACTS), more than 90% of the area’s population lives within three-quarters of a mile of a BAT route.
“The typical rider is a second wage earner in a household, who has a driver’s license, but the household only owns one vehicle,” Cooper says. “I suspect there are thresholds in the cost of running cars. There’s a point for every single family where it trips over to being more practical to use public transportation.”
A 2007 study commissioned by the nonprofit American Public Transportation Association concluded that a two-adult household saves an average of $6,251 year when one adult uses public transportation instead of a car to get to and from work.
The BAT system has been in existence since 1972. It’s funded through a combination of federal and state money, fare box revenues, advertising, and contributions from each of the six communities it serves plus the University of Maine. Single rides are a dollar; a book of five tickets costs $4. A monthly pass costs $40; a half-price pass is available to high school students. Through an agreement with the University of Maine, all students, faculty, and staff can ride free anywhere in the system.
BAT buses—which all run on biodiesel fuel—transport passengers six days a week, between six in the morning and six at night, on all routes except Hampden, which does not run on Saturday.
BAT supervisor Joe McNeil says that careful coordination of schedules and simplification of the fare structure have contributed to the system’s growing popularity. “The routes are designed so that people don’t have to wait a long time to make connections,” he says.
Designing an effective bus system to serve the needs of the greatest number of people is more complicated than most people think. And although the nine routes served by 17 buses (14 of which are in use during peak hours) manage to cover most of the area, gaps remain. “We’ve looked at trying to serve farther out on Broadway, including Bangor High School,” Cooper says. “We cannot get the buses out there and back on time.” Currently, the Center Street bus goes as far as the Broadway Shopping Center. Husson College is served by the connecting Mall Hopper route.
Timing is everything. Bad traffic patterns can cause lateness up and down the system, by forcing other buses to wait for connecting passengers. “Even a place that’s right on the route can be inaccessible because of the layout of the site,” McNeil says. To avoid problems in advance, BAT representatives “try to be involved in the planning stages of new development, like the new Shaw’s store being built on Stillwater Avenue. We’re already talking to the design engineers about a designated stop.”
The “spoke” design of the BAT system, in which bus routes converge in front of the Pickering Square parking garage, facilitates scheduling but can lengthen some trips, McNeil acknowledges. The Mall Hopper route was added a few years ago to allow passengers to travel between the Airport Mall, the Broadway Shopping Center, and the Bangor Mall without
transferring downtown. Planners are also looking at adding direct service at least once a day between the University of Maine and the Bangor Mall.
The Orono campus has 12,000 students, 2,500 employees, and 6,700 parking spaces, according to Alan Stormann, assistant director for parking and transportation. A yearly parking permit costs $50, which Stormann characterizes as “a pretty good deal when compared with other land-grant universities in New England.” By simultaneously giving away BAT rides and charging for parking, the university hopes to avoid the more expensive and less environmentally friendly option of building more parking spaces, Stormann says.
Additionally, the university encourages carpooling with designated no-cost parking spaces for employees who sign up for the program. Last summer, the university was named by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as one of the Best Workplaces for Commuters, an official designation that recognizes employers for reducing traffic congestion and related air pollution in their communities.
BAT buses all have bike racks, and the university encourages the use of bicycles through a fraternity-run network of “green bikes”—bicycles that have been either donated or abandoned, fixed up, and made easily identifiable by a coat of green paint. These can be borrowed and used at any time, and then simply left for the next user. The student government has also invested in two Zipcars, part of a nationwide time-share program in which users buy a membership and get a card that allows them access to the vehicle. There is no cost to the user beyond the membership and the price of gas. The program is entering its second semester at UMaine with mixed results. One of the cars ended up in the shop in December after a collision with a deer.
The chief complaint of students and other BAT users seems to be that the buses don’t run late enough. The last northbound bus on the Old Town route leaves Bangor at 5:15; the last bus to Bangor departs the university at 6:30. Miss them and you’re marooned. You’re also out of luck up at the Concord Trailways station, when the first bus coming back up the coast pulls in at 6 p.m.—15 minutes after the last BAT bus has left the nearby Airport Mall for downtown.
A survey of the system completed for BACTS in July 2007 by Tom Crikelear Associates of Bar Harbor reported that BAT passengers “expressed nearly unanimous support for service later in the evening.” The report discusses extending service to the University of Maine until 10:45 p.m., and to certain Bangor routes until 8:45 p.m. It also recommends a third bus on the Old Town route during the day to alleviate overcrowded buses—evidence that the university’s free bus pass program is working.
The Jackson Lab has made a similar commitment to encourage public transportation commuting, says Paul Murphy, general manager of Ellsworth-based Downeast Transportation. “They decided that their property was better suited to research facilities than parking lots,” he says. Buses now run between Ellsworth and Bar Harbor four times a day during the workweek. Lab employees receive discounted fares that are far less than the cost of gasoline. The buses make several stops in each town, and, like the BAT, are open to members of the general public.
Still, the Bangor metro’s public transportation picture remains an incomplete painting, with large stretches of bare canvas. Perhaps this is inevitable, given the region’s expansive geography and sparse population. There’s no way, for example, to take a bus to Dover-Foxcroft or Greenville, and if you wanted to travel by bus from Bangor to Quebec City—a five-hour drive—you would have to go through either Boston or Saint John, a process that could take days. And routes that are convenient for people traveling in one direction are not so usable for those going the other way. It’s easy for a Bangor-based magazine journalist to ride the bus down to Rockland and back for an interview, but a Rockland businessman with a midday meeting in Bangor can’t do the same thing, because there is no morning northbound (and no evening southbound) bus. The Cyr Aroostook County bus makes just one round-trip per day, and it begins and ends in Caribou.
So maybe while it isn’t possible for most of us in this neck of the woods to give up our cars completely, it is possible to use them less by taking advantage of what’s already here. “If you provide a service that’s convenient, easy to use, and more attractive than the automobile, people will use it,” says Murphy.
Think about this the next time you’re stuck in traffic, pumping gas, or looking for a place to park: Chances are, you could have taken the bus instead.
