Brittany Levesque leaves home at 5:45 a.m. every day to catch the Community Connector bus from her Bangor neighborhood of Capehart.
“I catch literally the first bus in the morning,” said Levesque, whose family moved to Bangor three years ago from Corinna. The time it takes her to get home has gotten longer since the Capehart bus route was scaled back last month, now running every hour instead of every half hour.
“It cuts so much time off my day,” Levesque said, adding that it’s impossible to take calls or get work done remotely from the bus since it’s often loud and crowded.
Levesque, who is also the mother of two children who use Bangor’s bus system, is one of many riders in the city who are concerned about footing the bill for a fare hike next year while managing the challenges imposed by service reductions that have piled up in recent years.
The city has struggled for years to maintain enough bus drivers to provide full service. It scaled back routes several times in recent months and has not yet returned Saturday service after suspending it in 2024. City officials hope that a new bus driver training facility planned to open in 2027 will help.
The Bangor Daily News spoke with numerous bus riders who expressed frustration with the system’s suspension of Saturday service and limited hours. Buses stop running around 6 or 7 p.m. on weekdays.
“It makes it really really hard for people out here,” Levesque said of her neighborhood, which has one of the lowest median incomes in the city and is the largest public housing site north of Boston. Families in the area find it hard to travel throughout the city on the weekends.
“There are so many of these programs that are free for you to do with families in town, but we can’t get downtown,” she said, mentioning offerings at the Bangor Public Library or the Zillman Art Museum that “so many families up here would love to take part in, but we can’t get there.”
Another bus rider, Scott Woodward, said he moved from Bangor to Hampden but purposefully chose a home that was still on a bus route. He always has bus tickets on hand and rode the Capehart bus line last week because his car had broken down, so he needed to get to his mom’s house to borrow her car.
“I couldn’t do without it,” he said of the bus, adding that he waited an extra half hour for one that day because the route had been scaled back.
The city cut back the Capehart route because it ran more frequently than most other routes, Laurie Linscott, the city’s transit administrator, said.
Lisa Wortman rides the bus every day from her home on State Street to Ocean State Job Lot in the Airport Mall, where she works, and said she’s also had to wait longer because of the Capehart route reduction. She transfers between three different buses and used to have time to run errands before work, but now she’s often late to her shift, she said.
While Wortman thought a fare hike made sense, some other riders were concerned about higher prices planned for next year, when fare for a single ride will go up from $1.50 to $2. The cost of a half fare, available to senior citizens and people with disabilities, will jump from 75 cents to $1.
City Council approved the hike in January along with plans to add new mobile payment and smart card options on the buses.
The city will first roll out the new mobile payment system and make sure everything’s working smoothly before raising fares, Linscott said. She estimated it would take about six months to install the new technology, although the city hasn’t yet selected a vendor and the timeline could be extended.
“It makes it a more modernized system” and removes barriers like having to buy paper tickets ahead of time, Linscott said.
It’ll be a while, then, before fares are raised, Linscott said. The price hike would likely be rolled out about a year from now. After that, the city would phase out paper tickets and replace monthly passes with a fare capping system, which will make rides free after someone hits a certain number in a month, around summer 2027.
Operating costs have been rising due to labor, fuel and vehicle maintenance and more services added for riders with paratransit and the opening of the downtown transit center in 2022, according to a January memo from Linscott and Assistant City Manager Courtney O’Donnell. This will be the first fare hike since 2014.
The city is still working to address a driver shortage. “We’re in a strong rebuilding phase right now,” Linscott said.
While the city’s public works department has been offering free commercial driver’s license and passenger endorsement training, people who participate sometimes find a higher paying job with a private company and don’t end up working for the city, O’Donnell told city councilors in September.
Community Connector drivers are paid anywhere between $21.05 and $28.96, depending on experience, according to a job posting on the city’s website.
This pattern of losing drivers, in combination with the number of drivers on medical leave or who can only work part time, make it hard to determine how many drivers are needed to restore full service, Linscott said.
Those challenges will hopefully subside with the addition of a renovated cold storage facility at 511 Maine Ave., which will include a new Community Connector training center.
“That training center will be, I think, a really big pivotal piece of the equation in workforce development and driver retention,” Linscott said. “We’ll be able to do our training so much more often and so much better.”
Construction on the facility is set to start this summer ahead of a fall 2027 opening, she said.
Multiple passengers noted that they’ve seen bus drivers handle difficult situations and it can be a taxing job.
Andrei Yermakov, who rides the bus a couple times per week to get to the grocery store and doctor’s appointments, said he has “mad respect for the drivers.”
