Boat Dreams: Potential Public Transportation Connections in Maine

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 Maine road map on the wall of my office, I dream of bigger things, too.

There’s a pie slice in the middle of the map, a bite of the Coast’s ragged but generally straight southwest-northeast line. Rockland, on the west side of Penobscot Bay, and Southwest Harbor, on the “quiet side” of Mount Desert Island, are separated by less than 40 miles of seawater. They are closer to each other than either town is to Bangor. To drive from one to the other requires a trip of more that 84 miles.

But most tourists come to the Maine Coast accompanied by cars and RVs. The highway between Bangor and Bar Harbor can become a particularly dangerous place during those busy months. Traffic tie-ups plague bottlenecks like Camden, Searsport, the Ellsworth High Street strip, and the one bridge on and off Mount Desert Island.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

There are potential public transportation connections for this part of Maine.

I dream of a day when a tourist can take a bus or train to Rockland, board a passenger ferry, and visit Mount Desert and Schoodic Point, all without a car. A family could do this, with the right infrastructure. And much of it is already in place.

The Island Explorer Bus System serves Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park from late May through mid-October. It’s great for hikers who want to be let off at one trailhead and picked up at another. It allows tourists to enjoy the sights without dragging a car along. And it helps to alleviate traffic and reduce carbon emissions in and around the park.

So let’s use a little seasonal and geographical imagination, and picture what’s possible.

Imagine a passenger ferry roughly the size of the boat that services Isle au Haut from Stonington. It can carry up to 78 passengers and a limited number of bicycles but does not carry motor vehicles. Imagine two such ferries a day, one starting in Rockland, the other in Southwest Harbor, with stops at North Haven, Stonington, and Swan’s Island. At Southwest Harbor, passengers could connect with the Island Explorer bus system and access all of MDI. (An alternative, to shorten the water distance by several miles, would connect the ferry with the Island Explorer at Bass Harbor, near the Swan’s Island ferry landing.) A seasonal passenger ferry connects Bar Harbor with Winter Harbor and the Schoodic Peninsula.

What a great way to travel the Maine Coast. Take a train to Rockland, then a boat to MDI and places between and beyond. Skip the hassles with parking, traffic congestion, and the trucks on the Interstate. The service would be a boon to the island communities along the way, allowing people an opportunity to travel between island communities that the present out-and-back routes do not provide. The ferries would run concurrently with the Island Explorer season. Maine could promote car-free, eco-friendly vacations along the Coast, from Kittery to Winter Harbor.

Because of its location, downwind from America’s industrial heartland, and because the lack of other choices forces visitors to drive there, Acadia National Park experiences days of poor air quality during peak summer system. Removing some of those motor vehicles from the mix seems like a sensible thing to do.

I’m old enough to realize that most of these dreams won’t come true within my lifetime. I’ll likely never use comprehensive land-and-water public transportation along the Coast that I call Home. But if enough of us get on board, we can nudge that ship in the right direction.