“I had an environmentally-conscious car maintainer bent,” Cushman admits. “For two years I did presentations for teen drivers around the state, until the driving did me in. When I stopped doing it, I was trying to find a way to work locally around alternative transportation.”
This is when she discovered the Cambridge, MA Green Streets organization. She contacted them to find out if anyone was doing something similar in Maine. Within an hour the Cambridge folks called her back and encouraged her to use their materials and bring the message to Greater Portland.
She did just that the following day at MunjFest 2007 and, despite bad weather, she says “people really gravitated toward it.” Seven months later, the group has an email list of more than 850 people and boasts 22 coordinators from Cape Elizabeth to Yarmouth. On the last Friday of the month, Green Streeters are encouraged to ditch their single-occupancy vehicles and either walk, bike, hop on a bus, take the train, catch a ferry, telecommute or carpool their way to work.
Each month, Cushman urges participants to sign-in at the website, http://portlandgreenstreets.org, listing how they plan to get to work. Last month the sign-ins jumped from 76 to 114. According to Cushman, this was a bigger than usual increase, with past months only seeing participation grow by 10 or 15 people.
Serve free coffee and they’ll come
One of the enticements to become a Green Streeter (besides the feel good factor of cutting your carbon load) is the long list of freebies available only to participants. In March, these included free coffee at Fog Cutter Coffee, Hilltop Coffee Shop, North Star Café (all in Portland) and Clayton’s Cafe in Yarmouth. Other Green Streets discounts range from free chair massages given by Balanced Bodywork Therapeutic Massage to $2 off at Portland Dog Wash.
“When I became aware they were offering free coffee, I knew we had to do it,” says Merry Kahn of Portland who serves as the librarian at Harrision Middle School in Yarmouth.
But don’t let her coffee talk fool you. Kahn was already doing her part to be a more responsible commuter. She drives a hyrbrid vehicle and frequently carpools with fellow teacher Amanda Blaine.
“But we make a real effort on that day,” Kahn says.
Blaine adds that “the days we carpool are such better days for me. It gives me a little social time before school.”
And even though last month’s Green Streets day dawned with a nasty snowstorm, Kahn managed to get 193 students and staff members to become Green Streeters for the day. “We wanted them to make a conscious effort to get to school another way,” she says.
Commuting another way
Cushman says walking and biking hold the top spots as the most popular ways of commuting green.
Blaine is a bike commuter in the warmer weather. She says the 15-mile commute to Yarmouth from Portland takes her 50 minutes by bike. She keeps clothes and shampoo at work, so she can shower and change once she gets there.
“It’s a really nice way to start the day and wind down as well,” Blaine says. “Like any new thing you try, it takes actually doing it and then it becomes routine. I tried the bike commute on the weekend first. Then it became easy.”
When the company Mary Anne Higgins works for relocated from Boston to Portland, she was determined to live within walking distance. She settled on the East End and now walks every day to her office on Fore Street. The walk takes her about 15 minutes on a good day, but this commute time can stretch to 30 minutes when the sidewalks are covered in ice.
“I did own a car for the first three months I lived here, then I got rid of it,” Higgins says. “I don’t need it, except for grocery shopping and I can figure that out. I personally do it because it’s healthy and it makes more sense.”
Coming from Boston, with its robust subway system, Higgins says her car-free existence is pretty easy in Portland. But she says the METRO bus would be a lot more user-friendly if it had longer hours.
“The route to the grocery store stops at 6 pm, so if you want to go do groceries after work it’s difficult,” Higgins says.
As an active Green Streets member, she’s working to improve the system by building more community support for buses and trains. “We’re trying to get companies to sponsor public transportation the way they sponsor parking spaces,” Higgins says.
And whether it’s selling companies on transit or getting people out of their cars, much will depend on education.
“One pound of carbon is released into the air for every mile a car drives,” Kahn says. “When we start really knowing what it is we’re doing ... it can be really bad news, and it’s easy to get upset about that — it becomes overwhelming. But we need to find positive steps and think about what I can do to help instead of what I’m doing wrong.”
One thing we all can do is become Green Streeters. It’s free — and so is the coffee.