Riding the Bus from Boston and New York to Portland

It must be summer — this site's seeing a big spike in traffic from people searching for "Portland-Boston bus" or "Portland to New York City bus".

If you're one of those people looking for a weekend getaway to the refreshingly mild, beachy shores of Casco Bay, here's a few tips from someone who makes the Portland-to-NYC bus trip pretty regularly.

• Concord Coach is the best way to get between Boston and Portland. They have buses that depart nearly hourly in each direction, they show movies (bad ones, usually), they offer free wi-fi, and the trip takes less than 2 hours. If you're coming from Portland, they'll also give you a free snack as you board.  
• You can almost always stow a bicycle in the luggage compartments of all the intercity bus services between NYC and Portland, Maine. The coach companies emphasize that they'll make no guarantees, but they've never not had room for my bike — even on buses packed with students headed to college with all their luggage. That said, they make no guarantees that there will always be room, so be prepared to leave your bike locked up at the station. 
• If there's no room for your bike on the bus, or if you don't feel like lugging it along with you, there are a few bike rental options in Portland once you arrive here.
• In Boston, Concord Coach stops at the South Station bus terminal, the same place where buses from NYC stop. There are lots of choices for trips between Boston and NYC. The Bolt Bus and Megabus are more comfortable, usually, but because they stop in midtown Manhattan, they spend more time stuck in traffic. Lucky Star and Fung Wah are cheaper and faster, you can buy a walk-on ticket from their office right before you leave, and, if you're headed to or from Brooklyn, their pickup/dropoff location at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge is more convenient.
• In the summertime, Concord Coach also runs two buses a day up Route 1 to Bangor, with stops in coastal towns like Brunswick, Bath, Freeport, Rockland (where you can catch the ferry to Vinalhaven), and Camden. With advance reservations, you can also catch a connecting bus from the Bangor terminal to Acadia National Park.
• The one drawback to taking Concord Coach is that their Portland station is in the boondocks, surrounded by freeway offramps. Cabs are cheap, though, and you can also take METRO's Route 5 bus, which stops there roughly every 20 minutes during the daytime hours (local bus schedules are on Google Maps).
• The train is also an option, on the Amtrak Downeaster from Boston to Portland, but it takes about 40 minutes longer than the bus trip. It also leaves from Boston's North Station, so it's a harder connection to make if you're traveling from the south. Because of the gap between Boston's South Station and North Station, there's no train that connects straight through from southern New England to Maine.
• Avoid Greyhound. They're more expensive and they have worse service.

The House transportation bill could kill Amtrak's Downeaster and most other transit services

The U.S. House of Representatives is today voting on H.R. 7, a 5-year transportation budget that would effectively kill public transportation in the United States in order to fund a Nero-like orgy of freeway construction and oil drilling.

Among the bill's features:

• Elimination of the Mass Transit Account, which Ronald Reagan created in the 1980s to fund transit capital projects and maintenance;
  
  
• Elimination of bike and pedestrian safety programs like Safe Routes to School. These programs comprise a miniscule fraction of federal transportation funding, but they make big impacts with safer crosswalks and more vibrant main streets. These projects use very modest funds to deliver big results to neighborhood safety and economic development. A political party that's fond of frugal government ought to embrace these programs — but a political party that's ruled by Big Oil paymasters might see them as an existential threat.
  
  
• Elimination of Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) rules that would allow state Departments of Transportation to divert funds from transit operations and bike/ped projects to highway expansion.
  
  It's worth noting that the workers at Maine's DOT have a revolving door arrangement with several highway engineering and construction firms, and that the Amtrak Downeaster service relies substantially on CMAQ funding for its day-to-day operations. This change would leave the door wide open for Governor LePage to yank Downeaster funding in order to build a new freeway to Gorham.
  
  
• And a massive expansion in domestic oil and gas drilling for good measure — as though sabotaging our public transit systems wasn't enough to make sure we stay addicted to the oil lobbyists who bought this bill from their Republican Party puppets.

Call your representatives and tell them to VOTE NO on H.R. 7, the House Transportation Bill:

Chellie Pingree: 1-888-862-6500 or email.

Mike Michaud: (202) 225-6306 or email.

New Hampshire 1st district (eastern/southern NH, including the coastal area):

Frank Guinta: (202) 225-5456 or email.

Construction on the Downeaster line

The Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority continues to wait for word from Washington about funding for its Brunswick extension project, but in the meantime, construction is about to get underway on a track rehabilitation project in Portland that will improve service on the existing Downeaster route and also prepare tracks for the eventual Brunswick extension.

Earlier this summer, the Federal Railroad Administration announced a half-million-dollar grant to the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority to improve the Downeaster's tracks in Portland, and to upgrade a turnaround near the Merrill Marine Terminal so that future trains will be able to turn and head north to Freeport and Brunswick. The map below shows the tracks that will receive upgrades as a solid red line, and the future northward extension will follow the dashed line up to Woodford's Corner and beyond:

If you've ever ridden the Downeaster, you've probably noticed the slow start coming out of the Portland station. The tracks that thread their way between the Cumberland County Jail and the new Mercy Hospital campus are old, and as a result, passenger trains are limited to a 10 mile-per-hour speed limit between the station and the bridge.

The planned upgrades will boost speeds on that section to 25 mph - not a huge difference, but one that will shave three to five minutes off of every trip south. The turnaround will also help the Downeaster deal with breakdowns more gracefully, and offer more flexibility for freight trains headed to the Merrill terminal.

Construction is set to begin this fall, and is scheduled to be complete by March 2010.

As for the extension to Brunswick, we should have a better idea of where that project stands next month, when the Federal Railroad Administration announces its first high-speed rail grants from the stimulus package (a Wall Street Journal article today outlines the stiff competition for stimulus funds).