New St. Lawrence Theater offers to pay for better bus service

The new performance hall for the St. Lawrence Theater on the top of Munjoy Hill is going up for its planning board review this month, and the proposal includes a nice treat for Portland's bus riders: in order to entice more of its audience to ride transit to the facility (which, in an unusually progressive fashion, will be built without any on-site parking), the nonprofit is offering to pay to increase frequency and extend service hours on METRO's Route 1, which runs up and down Congress Street from one end of the peninsula to the other.

Currently, METRO's Route 1 runs roughly every half-hour from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., with a couple of additional runs until 10 p.m.

If the new St. Lawrence Arts venue is approved, the bus would run every 20 minutes, until 11 p.m., six days a week. They're also proposing to rebrand Route 1 as the "Art Line," a reference to its route through the heart of downtown's arts district.

The funding required for the additional service – $70,000 a year – would come from a surcharge in ticket fees at the new venue.  They're also planning other goodies, like abundant bike parking at the front door and discounts for cyclists. You can read the full "transportation demand management plan" here. 

Obviously, the enhanced bus service wouldn't just benefit theater patrons at St. Lawrence Arts. It would also benefit late-night hospital workers at Mercy and Maine Medical Center, on the other end of the line, plus dozens of restaurants and other arts venues downtown.

But no good idea goes unpunished: a group of wealthy neighbors calling themselves "Concerned Citizens of Munjoy Hill" is working hard to sink the proposal, or at least force St. Lawrence Arts to build an exorbitantly expensive parking garage.

So, if you'd rather see more sustainable transportation on Munjoy Hill instead of yet more parking, let the planning board know: email your comments to Nell Donaldson, HCD@portlandmaine.gov.

Northwestern 'burbs get new express bus service

The Portland region just got its first new bus route in nearly ten years with the addition of the new Lakes Region Bus Service from RTP, the regional paratransit provider.

The service is modest, with only four round-trips per day and six stops along the route at town centers along Route 302. And with the possible exception of a stop at the end of Main Street in Raymond, most of the bus stops aren't in walkable locations.

Still, with a 30-mile span, the new bus could make a big difference in helping residents of Windham, Raymond, Casco and Naples drive less and save a lot of money in commuting costs.

The bus comes with some nice amenities, including free wifi and bike racks. For the rest of December, the service will be free; thereafter it will cost $3 for a one-way fare.

With only six stops, the bus will effectively offer express service into Portland at speeds comparable to driving. It resembles somewhat the existing ZOOM bus service from Portland to Biddeford, and I'd suggest that it might benefit from common branding with that service in the future.

Here's the route and schedule information. For detailed stop locations, visit rtprides.org/lake-region-bus/.

5 Reasons to Prefer Buses

Councilor Dave Marshall is trying to rally support for a streetcar line in Portland,  Maine.  I've written about this possibility previously, here, and I think it would be great to see it happen someday.

But not quite yet. Portland's regional bus network is woefully inadequate and we need to improve that system first before we talk about spending tens of millions of dollars on a single transit line that only serves a couple of select neighborhoods. Our city needs bus routes to Brunswick and Gorham a lot more than we need a streetcar to Woodford's Corner.

From the other Portland, where they've sunk a lot of money in light rail and streetcar lines, here are five arguments for building cheaper "bus rapid transit" routes — dedicated streets for buses — before we build streetcars and light rail:

Topology advantages. One thing that BRT does easily but rail cannot do is operate in an "open" configuration--meaning vehicles travel in a transitway for part of their journey, and then filter out into the existing street network without need for any special off-transitway infrastructure. Trains can only run where there are tracks and switches, but busses can mix between a busway and local operation. 

Partial operation: The ability of busses to run on ordinary streets has a second set of advantages. It permits easier phasing--agencies building a busway or bus lane can open half of it when it's done, and have busses run in the completed sections of the busway and on local streets the rest of the way, and then shift additional sections of the route into the busway when it completes.

Costs. For Class C/C+ operation [in mixed traffic, similar to most streetcars]; bus is way cheaper to install--it's just ordinarily local bus service, possibly with changes to traffic signals and nicer stations. The equivalent rail technology is mixed-traffic streetcar. Streetcar may be better suited to placemaking and land-use transformations, but the performance characteristics of mixed-traffic streetcar are generally the same as ordinary bus service; but streetcar requires installation of tracks. BRT also lets you do class B [dedicated lanes for buses, similar to most light rail lines] cheaply--if planners are willing to take a traffic lane.

Less prone to catastrophic failure. BRT doesn't break down as easily or as spectacularly when the line gets blocked or closed. This benefit is most often discussed in the context of streetcars vs local bus (where obstacles along the route are plenty), but even [rapid-transit rail] lines are impacted by events such as accidents, breakdowns, power or control failures, and maintenance of the right of way. With a BRT, vehicles can simply navigate around, leaving the transitway if necessary.

The ability to pass. BRT makes it far easier to mix express and local services and provide skip-stop service. Busses can simply pull out of the busway for stops; only a little more pavement and real estate is needed to enable passing. 

Here in this Portland, the streetcar concept is being promoted by nostalgic railfans whose love for trains obscures these more practical concerns. Some of our local rail advocates actually actively protest against expanding the region's bus system because they see it as a threat against their beloved choo-choos.

Unfortunately, as long as transit advocacy is dominated by these train-first fundamentalists, I doubt we'll see much progress of any kind.

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 Candidates on Transit

This week's Forecaster includes a rundown of the mayoral candidates' positions on transportation and transit in Portland. Some highlights:

• Dave Marshall continues beating the drum to build a streetcar along Forest Avenue to Woodford's Corner. While this is certainly a visionary idea, I'm curious to know how Dave plans to pay for a project like this one, which would easily cost upwards of $20 million. I'm concerned that too much of a fixation on trains could distract him (and divert scarce funding) from making more realistic improvements in the shorter term.
  
  
• Jed Rathband countered with a proposal to bolster city bus service funded from savings in diminished spending on public parking lots and garages. That may be less sexy than a train, but a whole lot more realistic and would benefit more of the city more quickly.
  
  
• Similarly, Markos Miller talked about revising the city's land use codes to support transit-oriented development instead of defaulting to our status quo of car-oriented development. Markos, of course, is also very involved in the efforts to reconfigure and redevelop Franklin Street, a project in which he'll play an important role whether or not he's elected.
  
  
• John Eder endorsed ZOOM service to Lewiston/Auburn. He wasn't involved at all in last winter's Legislative efforts, though, which makes me doubt his passion on the subject - I suspect he's just singing from the League of Young Voters' choir-book.

Overall, I think that Markos Miller has the most experience and knowledge with respect to the city's land use and transportation issues, and having worked with him frequently in neighborhood and smart growth activism, I think he's the best candidate in that regard.

That said, I also admire Jed Rathband's approach. While he's been less directly involved in these issues, they do dovetail with his primary interests in promoting small businesses and additional growth in downtown Portland and in outlying neighborhood centers, where automotive parking costs and regulatory burdens are the major barrier to additional growth. His proposed policies to re-direct city investments and development requirements from a focus on parking lots to a focus on better transit services is a pragmatic, fiscally responsible no-brainer that more candidates should be talking about.

I'll also probably cast a vote for Dave Marshall, although he probably won't be my first choice, for the boldness of his vision for better transit service in the city. Even if it is mostly political razzle-dazzle with little substance, at least Marshall is demonstrating to the other candidates that better transit can be a galvanizing idea for a more sustainable city.

ADDENDUM - other papers are covering this story this morning (10/5), and coverage from both the Press Herald and the Portland Daily Sun included a dig against METRO from fringe candidate Charles Bragdon.

However, only one of those newspapers did any fact-checking to see if Bragdon's Tea Party-style* claims were actually true or not. So kudos to the Daily Sun for holding Bragdon accountable:

"[Bragdon] also said the 'average ridership is about six people per route, per day' on Metro buses. (Metro officials said average daily ridership is more than 4,000 people.)" - from reporter Casey Conley's story in the Daily Sun

*i.e., inflammatory and false.

Megabus now booking for Portland-Boston Concord Coach buses

While there's been no actual increase in the number of buses going between Portland and Boston, you can now book your Concord Coach bus tickets to South Station via the Megabus website. By booking in advance on the website instead of buying your tickets at the station, you can get much cheaper fares (and also plan for and buy connecting bus tickets to NYC and the dozens of other cities that Megabus serves).

Right now, a round trip ticket to Boston, bought at the station, costs $36. But, if you can plan a few weeks in advance, you can now buy a ticket on the same bus for as little as $1 one-way through the Megabus website. Typical fares will be more than a dollar, of course, and indeed, Megabus might even charge more than the Concord Coach ticket counter in some situations, so it's worth comparison shopping. Still, if you're willing to trade the flexibility of a standard first-come, first-served Concord Coach ticket for a reservation on a specific bus, the Megabus option could save you some money.

Congress St. Bus Priority Corridor Meeting Tonight

This is kind of late notice, but tonight will be the first public meeting on the Congress St. bus priority corridor planning effort:

http://ci.portland.me.us/showart.asp?contentID=2009

It starts at 4 pm in the ICA (first floor of the ME College of Art building on Congress Street), and goes to 7. Maybe I'll see some of you there.

Regional Commuter Buses Could Come Next Year - If Transit Advocates Speak Up on Tuesday

LD 673, An Act To Expand Fiscally Responsible Transportation through Increased ZOOM Bus Service, is a bill that would establish new express commuter bus services to serve downtown areas along the Maine Turnpike corridor - an important step towards building more sustainable communities, reducing transportation costs for governments and households alike, and reducing Maine's reliance on oil.

This bill would, for the first time, shift the Maine Turnpike Authority's spending away from expensive highway widenings, and towards cost-effective transit - saving Maine millions of dollars in tolls and gasoline costs every year.

I've been working on this bill with the Maine Alliance for Sustainable Transportation for several months now. I'm very pleased to say that its chances look good: we have enlightened new management at the Turnpike Authority in Peter Mills, and a long list of sponsors from both political parties.

Still, many of the staff of the old "Turnpork Authority" still have their jobs and still want to keep Maine dependent on oil and pavement. They're still spending lots of money on lobbyists to maintain the status quo as much as possible.

LD 673 has a public hearing tomorrow in the State House, in Augusta. We want to pack the room with transit supporters. You should come.

We'll be arranging carpools - RSVP on Facebook if you'd like a ride from Portland or Lewiston. Come tell our lawmakers that Maine needs this bill to pass this year!

Can Buses Spur Economic Development?

A recent article in Streetsblog pointed out that Brooklyn's Fulton Street mall, open only to buses and pedestrians, is the most successful retail strip in the city outside of Manhattan.

There's no doubt about it. Buses do spur economic development, by bringing more people into street-level retail spaces, by giving landlords and tenants a much more affordable alternative to building and maintaining huge parking garages, and by saving money for local governments (which spend less on transportation infrastructure) and commuters (who spend less money on gas and cars).

An anonymous comment in the last post asserted (rather scornfully) that only trains can spur transit-oriented development. That's just not true. In Portland, we've seen much more new development happen along the Congress Street corridor between Maine Medical Center and Washington Avenue - a street where buses run every five to ten minutes during workdays - than we've seen in the neighborhood around the train station in Libbytown. Bus service deserves some credit for this new development along Congress Street for reducing employers' parking requirements and their commuters' expenses.

In fact, City of Portland zoning codes explicitly reduce parking requirements if the development is within walking distance of bus routes. And the builders of the recent expansion at Maine Medical Center cited the availability of bus service and its high rate of bus commuters among employees as a reason to build more space downtown than the hospital otherwise would have.

Unfortunately, the economics of intercity rail in Maine require large parking lots for drive-in passengers to access stations that are miles apart from each other. But the economics of local and intercity express buses like the Metro and ZOOM buses require dense, vibrant employment centers and residential neighborhoods where passengers can walk to bus stops that are within a few blocks of each other in downtown neighborhoods. That's the kind of transit-oriented development we need more of.

There's no doubt that a handful of people don't like riding buses, and Anonymous seems like s/he is probably one of them. But for many of us, any option is better than no option. For the vast majority of people - including the thousands of households in our cities who don't own cars - the idea of waiting a decade or more for Amtrak to expand to Auburn with only three trips a day is not that exciting when an intercity bus route could start up within months, serve more destinations, and offer dozens of trips a day, for a much lower price.

Before I get more angry notes from railfans, let me make it known that I absolutely want to see Amtrak expand to Lewiston/Auburn. But it won't happen soon and it will take even longer unless those cities really begin to lay the groundwork of becoming a transit-oriented community. I'll reiterate the points I made yesterday: those cities need to stop throwing away their money away on temples to free-parking socialism. And they need to invite smarter forms of downtown development, by bringing commuters in on buses until they can afford to bring even more people in by rail.

At the end of the day, "sustainable transportation" also needs to be financially sustainable, and transit advocates need to be practical. Connecting two of Maine's largest urban centers by passenger rail does make sense, but building it will be very, very expensive, and it will be at least ten years before our small, aging, and poor state is able to afford it.

In the meantime, though, buses can deliver a similar outcome - the efficient movement of thousands of people - for a fraction of the cost. Rail advocates might be threatened by the idea that buses could become too successful, and make people forget about buying an expensive new train. But that's no reason to sabotage an important new transit connection between Portland and Lewiston.

PS: You don't have to take my word for it - here are a few more examples of places where buses - not trains - have cultivated successful transit-oriented development:

• Almere (The Netherlands): "North Americans try hard to do 'transit-oriented development,' (TOD) but the Dutch are doing it on a massive scale. Even more heretically, they do it with buses! All of Almere is transit-oriented, and the transit is all in the form of busways," writes transit planning consultant Jarrett Walker.
• Pittsburgh: "Faced with a long, slender five-acre parcel of land between Centre Avenue and the East Busway, the project needed to encourage tenants to come to the neighborhood without turning it into a suburbanized desert of parking," from a review of a new bus-oriented retail development in the Pittsburgh City Paper.
• Bogota, Colombia: "Analysis across time reflects slight average annual increases in property values correlated with the implementation of the [Transmileno Bus Rapid Transit] system."

Train Enthusiasm Meets Fiscal Realities

As reported in a story in today's Lewiston Sun-Journal, the Androscoggin Valley Council of Governments is wrapping up a feasibility study for extending Amtrak service to the edge of Auburn - and potentially on through western Maine to Montreal. Here's a link to the public presentation the study team made the other night.

This has been a long-awaited study for rail advocates. But the news it delivered wasn't especially good for rail fans. I'll let the Sun-Journal's lede sum it up:

Establishing regular rail service between Auburn and Portland in 2020 could cost up to $234 million to start and could require an $8 million annual subsidy, according to a new study presented Wednesday night.

That figure is expressed in 2020 dollars - which, adjusted for inflation, amount to roughly $180 million in startup costs and a $6.1 million annual operating budget in today's dollars (assuming an average annual inflation rate of 3%). Putting the costs in 2011 dollars makes for easier comparisons to other Amtrak projects, like the expansion to Brunswick (which cost about $35 million). But by expressing the costs in future terms, the study's authors are already acknowledging that the money (in 2011 dollars) doesn't exist to make this happen.

There's more discouraging news: the extension to Auburn would be contingent on improving the existing Portland-to-Boston line for faster trains and one more daily round trip (for seven in all). Those are worthwhile projects, but they'll also be expensive - between $120 and $150 million.* This project alone will take several years to fund and build - I'll be pleasantly surprised if it happens by 2020.

Plus, the proposed train wouldn't even stop in downtown Lewiston/Auburn, within walking distance of thousands of jobs. Instead, it would stop on the industrial outskirts of town, in between a little-used airport and a complex of industrial warehouses. Passengers bound for L/A would need to take a bus shuttle to get anywhere.

Then there's the hard fiscal realities we're dealing with: the state is broke, and even if an increasingly tight-fisted Washington scares up more money for passenger rail, I would doubt that a project to connect two small cities in Maine with a 60 MPH train is going to rise to the top of national priorities.

So what's a transit advocate to do? Two things.

1. Don't rely on Washington or Augusta - local funding will be crucial to bringing Amtrak to L/A, and these cities could afford it, if they only started spending less money on parking garages and highway interchanges. Lewiston, in particular, has gone on a parking building binge in the past decade, spending tens of millions of dollars in local tax dollars to subsidize car travel. Auburn's about to build an expensive white elephant parking garage of their own. And both cities are pursuing big-ticket roadway expansions.
   
   The costs of all these automotive subsidies rival the costs of the proposed Amtrak expansion. Not only is this diverting money from transit improvements; it's also undermining the demand for transit down the road, by filling up downtown real estate with acres of car-storage units instead of with transit-oriented housing and workplaces.
   
   
2. But you can't have new housing and workplaces unless you're able to bring more people into downtown L/A, so start cultivating transit-oriented development now with a low-cost intercity bus service between Portland, L/A, and Augusta. That will bring new workers, businesses, and households into L/A's affordable downtown districts, raise property values, encourage new investment, and create a stronger customer base for when the cities are finally ready to invest in rail.

And as a matter of fact, the L/A Amtrak study concluded with a recommendation that an express bus should run between downtown Lewiston and downtown Portland as an interim measure. Sounds like a great idea to me.

*"Expensive" is relative, of course. The Maine Turnpork Authority had been planning to spend the same amount of money just to widen 9 miles of highway inside Portland's city limits. If Maine does in fact have that kind of money to throw around, the Downeaster is obviously a better place to invest it.

Nonstop bus service from Portland to New York City?

At the beginning of this month, New Hampshire's C&J Trailways started offering direct service from Durham and Portsmouth to midtown Manhattan in a five-hour daily trip. The buses will be equipped with extra legroom, and travelers will shave 30 minutes off their trip by not having to transfer buses in downtown Boston, as was previously required for a bus trip to New York.

Since this is a trip my wife and I make on a fairly regular basis, I naturally wanted to know whether Concord Coach was thinking about doing something similar from Portland, Maine. Their official reply: "At this time we are carefully monitoring the demand and evaluating our options."

Sounds good to me!

But on a closer look, would Concord Coach be able to compete with current options? The C&J service only runs once a day (twice on Fridays), early in the morning, whereas the Concord Coach/Chinatown connection offers buses nearly every hour, with only a short layover in South Station. The nonstop option is only convenient if you're planning an early morning departure from New Hampshire and an afternoon return trip from New York.

Plus, there's the price. A one-way trip from Portland to Boston plus a Chinatown bus from Portland to the Lower East Side currently costs $33: $18 to Concord Coach, and $15 to the Chinatown operators. C&J's $75 fare comes a long, long way from beating that price. Even JetBlue flights from Portland to New York are frequently cheaper than C&J's price - people in Portsmouth could drive out of their way to the Portland airport to make the same trip faster and at a lower price.

But airports are a hassle, and so is arriving at JFK, in the outskirts of Queens. If Concord Coach can set a competitive price, I'd be willing to pay close to airline rates for a convenient, comfortable bus that drops me off in Manhattan with my bike. I hope they can make it happen.