Slower Traffic

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.

Public transportation is all about making connections. It’s embedded in the name of Bangor’s local bus system: the Community Connector. But the bus service recently cut one of its two Capehart routes. Where buses formerly left the downtown Bangor Area Transit center at 15 and 45 minutes past the hour, they will now only run this route at 45 minutes past the hour. This means that it is no longer possible to use the local bus to connect with the bus to Rockland. I will either n

PetCo Field in San Diego, California Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan, combined age 176, brought their Outlaw Festival to Bangor recently, and...

I thought it might be useful to rate Maine’s bus stops, using a set of criteria geared to those of us who don’t own a car.