BANGOR, Maine — It’s only about 1.3 miles from the Judson Heights neighborhood to Bangor High School — a good, brisk trip that should last only about 25 minutes on foot. The journey also takes pedestrians near Dysart’s Restaurant, the Tractor Supply Co., a dentist’s office and a veterinary clinic.
But anyone who travels the route probably goes by car instead of bicycle or on foot. The area has no bicycle lanes and has only spotty sections of sidewalk, said Karen Marysdaughter.
Marysdaughter wants to fix that. The 62-year-old Bangor Climate Action Team member is among several volunteers and city officials working to make Bangor more pedestrian and bicycle friendly, she said last week.
Bangor is much too dependent on cars, Marysdaughter said.
“The downtown area has good sidewalks, but you get the slightest little bit out of downtown and you start to get sprawling neighborhoods,” she said.
Marysdaughter helped connect city officials with a team of University of Maine students who reviews the city’s “walkability” and presented their findings to the City Council Infrastructure Committee on Dec. 12. A walkable city is one in which more people walk and bicycle as a means of transportation, not just for recreation or exercise, the students pointed out.
The students presented the panel a 21-page examination of two recommended scenarios to achieve better walkability — creating about 5 miles of bike lanes and starting a walk Bangor campaign with 30 signs.
The hard costs for bike lanes look daunting — about $97,600 per mile just for roadwork alone. Other things, such as lane lighting, cost more. Yet the students estimated that the project would pay itself back in environmental, economic and health benefits to Bangor after three years and that the lanes would last 20 years.
Posting signs along walk routes, meanwhile, would be dramatically less expensive — $20 to $60 per sign.
But biking and walking lanes create healthier residents and decrease carbon dioxide emissions. They and a good public transportation system also make a city much more livable and attractive to prospective residents, particularly millennials, said Councilor Gibran Graham, infrastructure committee chairman.
Helping Bangor attract residents and continue to grow in an environmentally friendly way, while limiting urban sprawl, is a big goal for city officials, Graham said.
“There is a huge interest in attracting and retaining people to this area,” Graham said a couple of days after the meeting. “It’s not just downtown we are centered on. We want the whole city to benefit.”
To help draw more people to Bangor, next year city officials plan to upgrade the city’s regional bus service and create a multicultural center for recent immigrants, Graham said.
Improving the walkability of Bangor fits right in with that philosophy, and the city has finished some projects and has planned more with that in mind. City workers finished installing a multi-use recreational trail along Main Street and the waterfront from Railroad Street to Hollywood Casino Bangor in 2014. They installed six yellow-light traffic beacons to improve pedestrian crossings in Bangor in 2015, City Engineer John Theriault said.
City officials hope to install sidewalks on Hogan Road from Stillwater Avenue to Bangor Mall Boulevard in 2017. Also, sidewalks and road shoulders will be improved next year for pedestrians and cyclists on Broadway from Center Street to Husson University. The Maine Department of Transportation will handle the Broadway project, Theriault said.
A bicycle repair station is expected to be installed in Pickering Square next year, to help strengthen the city’s cycling culture, Graham said. Pickering Square also might be redesigned, and city officials eventually hope to connect West Market Square to the waterfront through Pickering, Theriault said.
In addition, the state is due to install sidewalks on Bangor Mall Boulevard to the Haskell Road intersection in 2019 or 2020, Theriault said.
Wherever possible, the work is funded through state or federal grants. City officials hope to use those sources to add sidewalks to sections of Union Street and possibly Broadway, if they can find the money, Theriault said.
The thrust in creating sidewalks and shoulders for cyclists is a relatively new phenomenon in Bangor. The advocacy of groups such as Marysdaughter’s, Theriault said, “is kind of changing everyone’s focus a little bit.
“It used to be all about the cars and the trucks and getting them through an intersection as safely as possible,” Theriault said. “Now it is more, especially in downtown, about, what is the safest design for everyone who comes through an intersection?”
But sidewalks are not enough, Marysdaughter said.
“It is not just the footing and the sidewalk. It is the density of population and mixed uses that make a good walking route,” Marysdaughter said. “If you have long stretches of ugly or boring landscape to walk through, people will not walk there.”
The city must launch publicity campaigns to improve Bangor’s walkability and make the city more attractive to walkers. That includes installing more park benches, trees, signs and flora to make walking a stimulating experience.