Slower Traffic

A winter that began with a great World Series ended last week with a great World Baseball Classic. The tarps came off the boat; the bicycle came out of the shed. The light is back, the ice is gone, and though we haven’t seen the last of cold or snow, there’s no stopping it now. Hope Springs eternal. The daylight lets me take the bike to work, slinging it on the Community Connector bus in the morning and then riding it home. It’s a good way to unwind at the end of the work

When I stopped owning cars, I began to see and feel how non-drivers navigate their days. And I became, almost without meaning to, an advocate for things like public transportation and pedestrian downtowns. But it was only after doing some research that I began to sense that I was part of a movement, small but growing, a pushback against the ubiquity of the car culture and the damage it has wrought.

In February I have boat dreams. My own small bit of foolishness is up on stands, covered with snow in a parking lot, awaiting the inevitable spring melt and the weeks of scraping, sanding and screwing things into place that precede the too-short sailing season. I daydream of a small anchorage and a beer in the cockpit and a baseball game on the radio. Sometimes I have nightmares about running the boat aground somewhere, often on a beach thick with trees. But as I gaze at the

When I stopped owning cars, I became, almost without meaning to, an advocate for public transportation, bicycling, and pedestrian-friendly communities. Only after I began to do some research did I realize that I was part of a movement, small but growing, a pushback against the ubiquity of the car culture and the damage it has wrought. I discovered a whole body of literature on the theme of relinquishing cars and reducing the harm that they do.

“Jaywalking" – a word people use today without a second thought – was coined by automotive interests in the 1920s,” say the authors of a new book, Life After Cars.* Their goal was to shame pedestrians as “jays,” slang for country hicks, implying that they didn’t know how to walk properly in the city, and neatly shifting the blame for pedestrian deaths and injuries from drivers onto the victims. Defining jaywalking as a crime only adds insult to injury. If jaywalking is a made

What is going on with Bangor’s bus system? Three years ago this December, we celebrated the opening of the Bangor Area Transit Center, a beautiful new nexus for the Bangor Community Connector, in the perfect location. The station still looks good. There’s new electronic signage, and new software than can tell you when the next bus will arrive and where it is on its route. But in terms of basic service, it’s been one setback after another.