More people are living in Maine. More people are flying in and out of Maine. That Portland International Jetport needs to vastly improve access for an increasing number of travelers is not up for debate.
Who wants to be turned away from short- or long-term parking with insufficient time for alternative arrangements? None of us.
And yet that’s what’s been happening at PWM, on and off, for months. Attempts to soften the effects of its parking “crunch” – using an offsite overflow lot and a shuttle bus – have received a lukewarm reception.
So it wants to build a large new parking lot.
Paul Bradbury, the airport’s director, called offsite shuttle lots “unsustainable,” saying: “You really need to get your parking within walking distance of the terminal to make it sustainable and have the smallest carbon footprint.”
The mention of the carbon footprint would suggest that Bradbury was referring to environmental sustainability. If this is indeed one of the airport’s concerns, why is it proposing to clear woodland and wetland adjacent to the terminal for the new lot? Why would it double down on the same car-centric structure responsible for its back being against the wall in the first place?
If you need to get to the airport in Portland and you’re not within walking distance, there are three primary means of getting there.
If you are on or near the peninsula, you can, with careful preparation and planning – and either good fortune or oodles of free time – take a city bus (route 5), that runs from Monument Square along Congress Street to the terminal. If your flight is before 07:30 a.m. on a weekday, before 08:30 a.m. on a Saturday or before 09:30 a.m. on a Sunday, as many are, well, you’re out of luck. Similar limitations apply in the evenings and, unless you want to walk the last mile with luggage, the bus timetable generally requires close scrutiny.
You can, with your fingers crossed, attempt to call a cab – last year, just 50 cabs were registered in the city – or use a ride-hailing app like Uber or Lyft. At peak and off-peak times, fares on the apps can be exorbitant, even for journeys that originate within a few miles of the airport. For very early flights, having your request for a car answered can be a gamble.
Finally, and all too popularly, you can drive yourself. As evidenced by its apparent disinterest in exploring alternative means of getting people to the airport, that’s what the airport wants you to do.
Sensible alternatives are not hard to arrive at.
Why not establish a dedicated airport bus that runs hourly (or more, according to flight itineraries), roughly along route 5? Why not make the “pink lot” shuttle buses more regular, so that even the blindsided passenger doesn’t feel the alleged sting of having to leave their car there? Why act as if something as commonplace as a five-minute shuttle bus journey places an unreasonable burden on passengers – or, as Paul Bradbury has suggested, on the environment? The problem is not the bus. It’s the cars.
As several readers of this newspaper have suggested, a vast expanse of disused parking space at the Maine Mall is ripe for exploitation by airport management. To create more passenger spaces at the airport itself, others have suggested shifting the onsite employee car park or the space used by rental car companies to the pink lot. Measures like these are successfully used by airports the world over.
If a parking lot is packed with cars owned by people who live near enough to the airport to be reasonably and reliably serviced by a minimum standard of connected ground transportation, that system of transportation has failed.
In this case, we have no such system. Too often, PWM passengers have no choice but to get in the car and bring it all the way to the airport. If we decide to pave six acres of green space at the airport, we tip the scale ever further against the completely reasonable expectation that mass transit options would be availed of by airport passengers living in and around Portland – and well beyond.
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