More Maine commuters drive farther, dodge car pools to satisfy lifestyles, jobs

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In a state where even the governor chooses a 40-minute commute rather than live in a house across the street from his office, it’s not surprising that more Mainers are driving to work alone, and it’s taking them longer to get there than it did a decade ago.

The average commute time in the state is now 22.7 minutes, a nearly 20 percent increase from the 19 minutes it took people to drive to work in 1990, according to recently released figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.

At least Gov. Angus King, who is driven in a Ford Expedition by a state trooper on his commute between Brunswick and Augusta, car pools. But he’s in the minority.

The numbers show that more people than ever are driving to work and more of them are traveling alone. Car pooling, the use of public transportation and walking to work all declined during the last decade.

And despite talk of Maine’s attractiveness to telecommuters, the percentage of people who worked at home was virtually unchanged.

“It’s worse than I expected,” said Evan Richert, who as director of the State Planning Office has advocated policies that would curb sprawl by encouraging people to live closer to their jobs.

Richert commutes more than an hour from South Portland to Augusta, but he used to walk to work before being appointed to his current post. He said he decided not to uproot his family for the temporary job that likely will end in January.

The Census figures show that two trends are at work here, Richert said.

People are spreading out, choosing to live in rural communities and driving farther, most often by themselves, to their workplaces. At the same time, the decline in the natural resource-based economy of northern Maine has forced area residents to travel greater distances to find jobs.

In 2000, 11.3 percent of the work force car pooled, down from 14 percent in 1990. Still, that was the second-highest percentage of car poolers in New England, behind Vermont, where 11.9 percent of workers drove together.

The percentage of workers who said they walked to work also dropped during the last decade, from 5.4 percent to 4 percent.

The number of people who use public transportation to get to work or who work at home remained relatively unchanged at 0.8 percent and 4.4 percent, respectively. The percentage of Mainers who work at home is second in New England only to Vermont.

North vs. south

Not surprisingly, the commutes tend to be longer in crowded southern Maine where people seeking a bit of privacy and land to call their own are moving to small communities but continuing to work in Portland, Portsmouth, N.H., or even Boston. Work currently is under way to widen the Maine Turnpike south of Portland to accommodate the increasing number of cars.

The shortest commutes, by and large, are in northern and eastern Maine where people still tend to work locally. In Eastport and Houlton, for example, the average commute time was only 13 minutes, according to data gathered from the Census’ long form, which was answered by one out of six state residents in 1999.

However, some of the state’s longest drive times can be found in Penobscot County where many residents are flocking to newly built homes in former farming communities, yet keeping their jobs in Bangor. Others have been put out of jobs by shoe factory closings and paper mill downsizings, and now must come to the city to earn a living.

The longest average commute time in the state for towns with more than 500 workers, according to the 2000 Census, was from Bradford, a small community about 20 miles northwest of Bangor. The average time for that community was 40.8 minutes, up substantially from 31.9 minutes a decade ago. The town’s population has increased more than 33 percent since 1980.

“I’d rather be out in the country than in the big city,” said Derek Randall, who commutes daily from Bradford to Bangor, where he works nights for General Electric Co.

He grew up in the area where he now lives and wants to stay close to his family, so the drive to Bangor that he has made for 12 years is more of a necessity than a choice, Randall said. He’d rather work closer to home, but there are no jobs in the area.

Bradford residents commute primarily in one of two directions, said Town Manager Clinton Deschene, who makes the reverse drive from Bangor to Bradford. They either go south to Bangor or northwest to the Dover-Foxcroft area. A few head north to the paper mills in Lincoln or Millinocket, although both have decreased their work forces during the last decade.

The country life

The commute time from Bradford has grown during the last decade because more people are moving there to escape to the country, Deschene said. Since Bradford is farther from Bangor than the bedroom communities of Hermon and Glenburn, it is an attractive area to those seeking a more rural lifestyle and lower property taxes.

“The people who are moving here are the people who commute,” Deschene said.

Many say they do it so they can escape the crowds and own a sizable chunk of land in the country.

“Given the choice, I’d like to be closer, but then we couldn’t have the lifestyle we want,” said Bangor lawyer Stuart Cohen, who lives in Dixmont where the average commute time is 33.1 minutes.

That lifestyle includes 40 acres of fields around the home he and his partner, Anne Warner, built in 1991, giving them plenty of room to walk their golden retriever without running into other people or cars. They also can enjoy the beautiful night sky and views of the surrounding hills.

“It’s nice and quiet,” Cohen said.

Until last year, Cohen made the half-hour drive to Bangor with Warner, who worked at a local bank, putting them among the 14.7 percent of Dixmont residents who car pooled to work. That’s well above the 11.3 percent of people who car pool statewide.

Many are forced to drive long distances just to find decent-paying jobs. In Lincoln, for example, the major employer, a paper mill, has cut its work force during the last decade. Other mills in the area also have cut back or closed. The average commute time in Lincoln increased from 14 minutes in 1990 to 24 minutes in 2000, one of the largest jumps in the state as local residents have been forced to head out of town for work.

Foot traffic

While many Mainers are willing to spend long hours in their cars going to and from work, a large number of those in college and mill towns choose to walk.

Richard Brucher, an English professor, walks the nearly two miles from his Orono home to his Neville Hall office on the University of Maine campus almost every day.

“I walk because it’s close … it’s better for me; I like not using the fuel and I like not having the hassle of getting a parking place at the university,” he said.

“It pleases me every time I leave the car in the yard,” Brucher added.

Brucher used to drive more than 30,000 miles a year. When he and his wife thought about moving away from Bucksport four years ago, they decided they would like to be able to walk to work.

So do a lot of other Orono residents. Twenty-three percent of workers walk to work, more than five times the state average of 4 percent. Still, the percentage of walkers in the college town has dropped from 30 percent in 1990.

Other towns with unusually high numbers of walkers include the paper mill communities of Lincoln, Madawaska and East Millinocket where 12 percent of workers rely simply on shoe leather to get to their jobs.

Mill towns that were set up by paper companies so workers could walk to and from work might serve as a useful model for curbing sprawl, Richert said.

In East Millinocket, for example, the mill is on one end of town and the schools are on the other end, with streets lined with houses in between.

Today, zoning regulations push people out of city centers and school construction policies favor new buildings well outside of town so large athletic fields can be built, Richert said.

The recent Census data provide an “early warning” that “we are backing ourselves into a corner,” he added.

Public transportation, car pooling

Because Maine is such a rural state, the use of public transportation has been – and is likely to remain – minimal. Only 5,200 workers said they used it out of a total of 615,000 workers statewide.

“That’s ridiculous,” Richert said.

But, he acknowledged, the number of people riding buses isn’t likely to increase anytime soon. That’s because for it to work, there needs to be a critical mass of people living near each bus stop, and they must be going to an area with not only employers but with shops, restaurants and other businesses nearby.

While still low at 1.2 percent, the use of public transportation in the Bangor metropolitan statistical area, which includes 14 communities from Winterport to Milford,was the second-highest in the state for such areas, trailing only Portland, where 1.7 percent used public transit.

The state’s car pooling numbers, which dropped from 14 percent to 11.3 percent between 1990 and 2000, also are disappointing.

“It’s an uphill battle,” said Sandi Duchesne, a transportation planning engineer with the Bangor Area Comprehensive Transportation System. She lives on Pushaw Lake in Hudson, 18 miles from her Bangor office. But she sometimes bikes part or all of the way to work.

Even though people in the Bangor region are spread out, they tend to live along major corridors such as Route 15 and Route 9 so car pooling is feasible, Duchesne said.

A new state initiative uses a computer program to match up people wishing to car pool. To alleviate people’s concerns that a car pool could leave them stranded in an emergency, participants will be given a free ride home by taxi or rental car if they need to pick up a sick child or work unscheduled overtime. Car pooling could save someone who commutes 15 minutes each way $400 a year in gasoline costs and $2,400 annually in wear and tear on a vehicle, said Duchesne.

In addition to such initiatives, the state should provide more funding for bicycle and walking routes to encourage people to use these means to get around, Duchesne said, pointing out that the highway system is totally funded by the government.

Meanwhile, a small percentage of Mainers choose not to commute at all. In 2000, 4.4 percent of workers said they worked at home, up slightly from 4.3 percent in 1990. The highest percentage of stay-at-home workers are clustered along the coast. In Deer Isle and Rockport, for example, 10 percent of workers do so at home.

“There’s an entrepreneurial bent all up and down the coast,” said David Cole of the Eastern Maine Development Corp. Many people who live in the region fish, make crafts to sell to tourists, and are otherwise self-employed. A newer breed of people is moving to such communities while writing for magazines in other states or designing software for distant companies, he said.

Practicing what they preach?

The fact that so many Mainers get in their cars every day and drive many miles by themselves to work frustrates planners and environmental advocates who push for more car pooling and walking to work to curb pollution and oil consumption.

“It’s terrible,” Sue Jones, air project director for the Natural Resources Council of Maine, said of the trends away from car pooling and alternate means of getting to work.

“Mainers need to be aware of how polluting, how damaging cars can be to our environment,” said Jones, who drives 50 miles from Yarmouth to the NRCM office in Augusta. She tries to work at home one day a week.

Last year, Maine recorded 14 bad air days when ozone levels reached dangerously high levels, according to the Department of Environmental Protection. That was the most recorded in 13 years.

Ironically, many environmental advocates like Jones are some of the most avid commuters. Staff at NRCM travel from as far away as Old Town and Belfast. Until recently, Green Independent Party gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Carter routinely drove from his home in Lexington Township, near Kingfield, to an office in Augusta.

Jones said that oftentimes choices about where to live are dictated by family obligations or other factors and that her co-workers are cognizant of their impact on the environment and try to live in energy-efficient homes, for example.

“We are trying as much as we can to minimize our impact on the environment,” Jones said.

“There is always room for improvement,” she conceded.

Michael Moore, the NEWS computer-assisted reporting specialist, developed the numbers for this story. Analysis was confined to communities with 500 or more workers over age 16.