In this land of “you can’t get there from here,” the phrase is nowhere more applicable than in the area of public transportation.
    In my unending quest to remake southern Maine in the image of North Jersey (that’s not as bad as it sounds to you natives) I just can’t seem to figure this one out.
    Part of the problem is the difference between image and reality. The greater Portland area is considered the sophisticated, college-educated, urbanized (or at least suburbanized) member of the Maine family. We are Maine’s Manhattan to the rest of the state’s Utica and just like Manhattan and Utica, it is difficult to determine which sibling resents the other more. The reality and the problem, at least as far as public transportation is concerned, is that greater Portland is nothing like Manhattan. Greater Portland is densely populated, but only relative to the rest of Maine. Compared to the rest of the east coast, we’re in the sticks.
    My favorite statistic to cite when someone from home asks me what Maine is like is that Portland is Maine’s largest city, yet it has a population of 60,000. According the 2000 census, Portland ranked 427 (out of about 600) on a list of cities with populations over 50,000, and was less populous than such well-known destinations as Brooklyn Park (Minn.), Murfeesboro (Tenn.), Broken Arrow (Okla.) and Odessa (Texas). The population of our younger sister city, Portland, Ore. is almost 10 times it’s east coast namesake’s population. And we wonder why it’s simply referred to as Portland.
    Anyone worried I may realize my quest can rest easy. There are nine cities in North Jersey alone larger than Portland.
    The whole point of public transportation is to move large groups of people from point A to point B, picking up and dropping off passengers along the way. Without large groups of people there is little chance of public transportation working without huge public subsidies. This hasn’t stopped people from trying. The result is a patchwork of municipal and private bus systems serving very little of the greater Portland geographic area.
    South Portland has a bus system with three routes (1, 3 and 4– I wonder what happened to 2?) and Portland has a system with eight routes covering four municipalities (Portland, South Portland, Westbrook and Falmouth). Then there’s the Regional Transportation Program, a service provided by United Way, that is a system of buses, vans and volunteer drivers, with which, if you live in Gorham maybe you can catch a ride on Friday, but if you need to get somewhere on Wednesday, maybe they can arrange for someone to pick you up.
    Biddeford, Saco and Old Orchard Beach have their own bus system and the Turnpike authority has the ZOOM.
    The result is places that are well served by several services (the Maine Mall) and duplication (South Portland buses in Portland and Portland buses in South Portland) and places that are not served at all (Cape Elizabeth), except for RTP. For me, this public service conundrum was more or less an interesting, if abstract, example of how a diffuse population limits the government from efficiently serving the public. There’s a reason the majority of people in the region don’t have a bus stop on their block: it would be incredibly wasteful to have buses trolling the side streets of Cape Elizabeth, Scarborough looking for a handful of people who may need a ride, but there has got to be a better way than everyone coming up with their own solution.
    The problem became concrete as a result of my wife and my one-car experiment. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that if I gave myself enough time, I could probably get from my house in Portland’s West End to my office on Main Street in Biddeford by taking public transportation. I knew there was bus service in Portland (Metro), bus service in Biddeford (ShuttleBus) and bus service in between (ZOOM and Shuttle Bus Intercity Service. I was confident I could find a way to get to work on my own.
    It seemed at first that, you couldn’t get there from here, unless your boss is ok with you showing up a couple hours late each day and leaving a few hours early.
    The first ShuttleBus service leaving Portland City Hall on its way to Main Street Biddeford is 9:25 a.m. and arrives at 10:15. The last bus in the opposite direction leaves at 3:45 p.m. Part of the problem is most commuters are traveling in the opposite direction, which the schedule accommodates.
    Perhaps I needed to be more creative, I checked out the ZOOM schedule and lo and behold there are five morning buses leaving within walking distance of my home that arrive at the Biddeford Turnpike exit near Southern Maine Medical Center before 9 a.m. From there I can pick up a bus to Main Street, Biddeford. It would cost $83 for monthly passes (not bad considering gas and tolls for a passenger car). If I catch the right buses, it would take about an hour.
    I’m glad I now know I have that option, but it seems that it shouldn’t be that difficult to figure out a way to get between two population centers less than 20 miles apart. If I lived in a different part of Portland, I would need three different bus systems to make the trip, instead of two.
    I wonder why, when everyone is talking about regionalizing, there isn’t a unified public transportation system. Perhaps with a little less duplication of service (both in terms of overhead as well as routes), and a single brand (not to mention source of information) public transportation in Maine could serve more people more efficiently– like in New Jersey. There it’s called NJTransit, not rocket science.