Putting Greenville on the right track

The awesomeness of the scenery around Greenville blows minds away. The air is crisp and clean. The nearest traffic light is 35 miles away and the nearest junk food 26 miles away. Greenville is a Field of Dreams in a world that has few of them left.

To learn about Plum Creek was a heartbreaker. Et tu, Brutus? Even Greenville?

Then I read Tony Bartley’s op-ed (BDN, Aug. 4) about the town’s need to seize the opportunity for economic development, which it enjoyed 100 years ago in the form of numerous hotels and sporting camps. I also read Greenville Town Manager John Simko’s letter (Aug. 19), which pointed out that state funds for schools and hospitals are designed to reward areas that experience population growth and punish those whose

population is in decline.

I have read about the vandalizing of the development company’s property and seen opinion pieces pro and con.

But there is one topic no one has broached: the highway that new residents and increased numbers of tourists will use to reach Greenville. The current roads, one each from Bangor and Newport that converge in Dover-Foxcroft for the final 35-mile stretch to Greenville, are appealingly bucolic two-laners that provide a good introduction to the beauty of Moosehead Lake.

North of Dover-Foxcroft, I recently became stuck in a line of cars following one that was traveling no faster than 32 mph. Eventually all cars but the lead one turned off and I was able to see the V for veteran on the license plate of the slow-moving vehicle. Its occupants were very elderly.

After 975 new families buy houses in Greenville and increased numbers of tourists flock to new resorts, no elderly veteran will dare chance the road, which, if the history of the past 50 years is a guide, will be widened and straightened.

The goal of widening and straightening projects is to make traffic faster and safer. Thirty years ago, it was an admirable goal. But we now see 50,000 traffic deaths a year.

After a connector was built through a wooded area in the late 1990s to connect I-95 in Topsham with Route 1 in Brunswick, the area changed from a sleepy backwater to one that has seven traffic lights and housing and commercial development. There is no truer example of a highway being built and traffic arriving to choke it. Topsham is now sprawl.

Topsham’s fate does not have to be Greenville’s fate.

History suggests that Plum Creek will win the day in a modified version. But Greenville can take up where Bartley’s op-ed left off. “At one time,” he wrote, “this area was served by three rail lines. When the railroads went out of business … people stopped coming to Moosehead.”

He stops short of calling for the difficult but doable solution: boost the economy via Plum Creek but avoid the inhumane spectacle of commercial strip development and the road rage, pollution and highway fatalities that go hand in glove with it. Build a train.

Germany spends 22 percent of its transportation capital spending on railways, France spends 21 percent and this country spends 0.4 percent. Our government has subsidized highways and airways so heavily that we are no longer free to make transportation choices. Petroleum interests make it for us. They own us. We own the sprawl.

The only Amtrak service this state has is the Downeaster that operates between Boston and Portland. It cruises at up to 80 mph, is cushy and smooth and goes from center city to center city as riders watch New England fly past.

TrainRiders/Northeast, a citizens group I belong to, and which with no corporate support brought this service back to Maine, now works to extend it to Brunswick, Augusta, Waterville and Bangor, among other locations. But we did it – we built a train. And what an economic tool it is. It has wrought small miracles of development by revitalizing town centers.

The old railroad tracks between Newport and Greenville are gone. It will not be cheap to rebuild them nor will it be cheap to establish passenger service. But transportation never comes cheap. Neither is it easy to deal with federal and state governments that are in lockstep with petroleum- based highway and airline industries.

But to pull it off! To fight hard for passenger rail service and win is to create a better life for everyone who uses it. As E.B. White wrote, “A state without rail service is a state that is coming apart at the seams, and when a train stops at a village depot anywhere in America and a passenger steps off, I think that village is in an enviable condition…”

It is a given that passenger trains give rise to increased real estate values, feeder bus lines, rental car agencies, restaurants, hotels, and retail shops. (Build a train and you may not need the Plum Creeks of this world.)

When rail service returns to Greenville, elderly veterans will board with happy hearts. Students will board with laptops. Other passengers will travel with books, bicycles, cameras, fishing gear, and disposable income. And every person who steps off will put Greenville “in an enviable condition.”

Paula Boyer Rougny is a member of TrainRiders/Northeast.