STUDIES:Maine East-West Highway

To a Canadian the state of Maine constitutes an enormous ugly American intrusion, a tumor-like ‘growth’ which has pushed itself 200km north of the general line of the US border with Canada. This remote knotty-shaped American state of woods, lakes, glistening rivers and moose and rolling hills (that they misname mountains) has the great economic bulk of Quebec and Ontario to its southwest and the Canadian maritime provinces to its east. Maine and its winding hillocky pre-earthmover day roads constitutes a major blockage to efficient and safe land transport between the rich Atlantic seaboard of Canada and its populous hinterland of Quebec and Ontario. A backwoods US state of less than a million (and falling), it is surrounded by dynamic Canadian provinces totalling 20m that are modernizing and building and attracting settlers from all over the world.

A million missing trucks

Richard Mueller, an economist at the University of Maine who has done studies of regional transport issues has pulled together statistics showing over a million Canadian truck trips a year go the long way around Maine because of its lack of modern east-west roads. About 2,700 trucks/day stick to the Trans-Canada Hwy following the St Lawrence Valley way north to get around Maine between Montreal and the Maritimes.

The proposed Maine East-West Highway (ME-W Hwy) from Calais (they pronounce it ‘callous’) on the Atlantic coast by the New Brunswick line to Coburn Gore in the far northwest of the state near the New Hampshire/Quebec borders would connect easily into Canada’s extensive motorway system. On the east side there’s a nearly complete 2x2-lane Canadian motorway from St Stephen through the New Brunswick port city of St John to Moncton down the isthmus of Nova Scotia and via the new Cobequid Pass turnpike all the way to the deep port city of Halifax NS. At the western end of the proposed ME-W Hwy the Quebec motorway system extends east from Montreal (A10) and from Quebec City (A55) to Sherbrooke just 80km (50mi) from Maine’s Coburn Gore border crossing.

$50 savings per trip

A ME-W Hwy direct across the state would save Canadian trucks 165km (103mi) on trips between Montreal and eastern New Brunswick, Prince Edward Is, and Nova Scotia. And it would save 250km (156mi) for trips to southwestern New Brunswick — to the port city of St John. If trucks cost 30c/km to operate then if they save 165km they should be prepared to pay tolls of up to $50/trip across Maine to cut that distance, other things being equal. To attract Canadian trucks the ME-W Hwy might need to be built to take heavy Canadian rigs — up to 60% greater weight limit than US standards. And the two border crossings would need to be made as painless as possible, maybe by giving special clearances to trucks simply passing through the US.

Mueller reports that truck traffic between Maine and Canada has almost doubled in the last 8 years anyway so there is already a growth in business, but it is currently very small by toll road standards.

The Maine Turnpike had Wilbur Smith do a brief “Toll Road Exploratory Assessment” last year. The 6-page report dated April 1997 looked at current traffic on ME-9 between Bangor and Calais to the east and US-2 to the New Hampshire border west. ME-9 is only currently running about 2,000 veh/day and US-2 about 6,000. The Coburn Gore crossing with 2x3m paved roads presently sees about 100 trucks a day. The 2,700 trucks/day (1m/yr) that might be diverted from the long all-Canada route up and around Maine would be a solid base patronage for a ME-W Hwy.

The Maine Turnpike is not pursuing the project. It has its hands full modernizing and widening its existing system in southern Maine where most of the state’s population lives. The east-west highway probably needs its own separate entrepreneurial entity.

The ME-W Hwy is seen by its promoters in central Maine as a regionally transforming development project, which will have to be financed quite largely with tolls, but which is intended to provide the infrastructure for an economic renewal of a depressed and neglected backwoods part of the United States.

Backwoods poverty

The southwest of Maine, the funnel-shaped portion wedged between New Hampshire and the Atlantic coast is prosperous, being plugged in to the economy of the greater Boston/southern New Hampshire area. But the center and north of Maine is heavily depressed, much of it with double-digit unemployment rates, high welfare rolls, and per capita incomes well below the regional average. Bangor, the largest city in the center of the state is losing population for lack of economic opportunity. So are most of the other towns around.

Revival-oriented groups see an east-west highway as a way of bringing business and jobs to central Maine. They already have a good connection south to New England and New York (down I-95 and the Maine Turnpike) but with new modern connections east to the Maritime provinces, and west to the heart of Canada and to Detroit and Chicago, they see the possibility of offering land around towns like Bangor as strategically located for major regional warehousing, factories and logistical centers that can take advantage of a new crossroads location — Maritimes east, Montreal/Toronto west, Borstun south.

A lobby group called the Maine East-West Highway Association has been funded by chambers of commerce. Bunches of elected officials including the popular state Govnr Angus King, have declared themselves in favor. In its last session the state legislature ordered studies of the ME-W Hwy and allocated $600k. The major newspaper up there supports the road. It is early days and there are huge obstacles to be overcome, but at the very least there is work for consultants! And some of the political and financial uncertainties that would plague a purely investor-driven effort are being resolved first up.

As we go to press RKG Associates, a 10-person firm in Durham NH partnered with Standard & Poors/DRI, seems to have beaten out Wilbur Smith and two other contenders for a $200k economic impact study being supervised by the Maine Planning Office. The Maine DOT has $400k for studying alternative routes, looking at transp and enviro impacts and financing. Both agencies are under state legislative instruction to report by the turn of the year but seem likely to slip that by 6 months or so. By this time ‘99 there should be a clearer picture of what is doable.

Halifax landbridge

The economic studies getting under way aim to see what opportunities there are for working with ports on the Atlantic coast, both small Maine ports and the ports of St John NB and Halifax NS, to compete more effectively. At present most Canadian seaborne freight goes up the St Lawrence to the port of Montreal. Halifax handles containers but it presently does only a half of the business of the port of Montreal. The trend to larger deeper draft container ships favors deep ocean ports like Halifax (18m draft) and St John over tidal river ports such as Montreal, which has 11m draft and winter ice.

Mueller’s tables show that already the largest truck traffic going around Maine is Ontario-Nova Scotia and then Ontario-New Brunswick. Coming next is Quebec-New Brunswick, then Quebec-Nova Scotia. Virtually all this stuff would do much better running through Maine on a modern turnpike.

Tourism and general travel into Maine from the heart of Canada might also increase considerably with an ME-W Hwy. A modern road would make the Maine Atlantic coast 3 to 4 hours drive from Montreal, and 8 hours from Toronto, trips which are about 7 and 12 hours now. Montreal to St John NB would be 6 hours compared to 12 or more now. It would become feasible for Montrealers to have weekend houses on the Atlantic coast for the first time. The beaches, lakes, fishing, hunting, hiking and boating along the Atlantic coast, both Maine and the Maritimes, would become far more accessible for the 5m people of Toronto and the US midwest.

As its supporters see it, the east-west hwy can make use of about 50km (30mi) of I-95 where it departs center-state from its general north-south orientation between about Pittsfield and Bangor. From Bangor east to New Brunswick along the general alignment of ME-9 is about 125km (80mi). Between Calais on the US side and St Stephen in New Brunswick there’s the issue of a new bridge over the St Croix River that divides the two countries. ME-9 is an old 2-laner basically and the only response on the Maine side to the extensive motorway construction in New Brunswick has been installing 3rd truck passing lanes on the worst hill sections. Westward from the Pittsfield area (or nearby Newport) where I-95 turns south toward Boston there are two general options. The stronger economic route is almost certainly the direct one which is northwest to Coburn Gore and the Quebec border. But it angles rather acutely across the generally north-south grain of the hill ridges and the river valleys, so much of the route would be completely new. Most of it is land owned by large lumber and paper companies but it has to thread its way around some very pretty lakes and wilderness reserves and goes through beautiful rather pristine looking river valleys.

Thoreau

Naturalist Henry David Thoreau wrote of Maine’s “immeasurable forest for the northern sun to shine upon” and of its lakes as having the effect upon the eye of “a mirror broken into a thousand pieces.” The state understandably attracts those who love the land for the lack of a human imprint, and will passionately oppose a highway as desecration of a beautiful wild landscape. In Europe and Japan many motorways have been built in the most beautiful wild landscapes with a combination of sensitivity to landforms, preservation and restoration of vegetation, tunneling through highlands and construction of fine cleanlined sweeping bridges over valleys and rivers. Perhaps I-70 in the Rockies with the Eisenhower Tunnel and the long bridging through Glenwood Canyon is the best example we have in the US of a highway that respects the grandeur of the wild. Something of that sensitivity to the feelings of latterday Henry David Thoreaus, met by a willingness of environmentalists to compromise for economic progress and human welfare, may be needed to get agreement for the ME-W Hwy.

An alternative general alignment slightly south of west to the New Hampshire border from Pittsfield would be something less of a totally new intrusion into the Maine wilds because it more or less follows the existing winding 2-lane US-2. Some think this route would be more acceptable to environmentalists in Maine. Both the northwest route to Coburn Gore/Quebec, and the US-2 route west to NH are about the same distance inside Maine — 135km (85mi.) But to complete a motorway standard link to Quebec via US-2 would require another 130km (80mi) of mwy through the White Mountains of NH near Berlin and possibly a short stretch in VT to hook up with I-91 at St Johnsbury. This US-2/I-91 southern route is about 110km (70mi) longer to Montreal than the direct northern route via Coburn Gore, so its ability to attract and to toll Canadian traffic would likely be much reduced. And it might just stir up the greens of two or three states instead of one!

Against that it must be noted that the legislatures of both NH and VT have both established committees to pursue US-2 as an “international trade corridor” in collaboration with Maine so there is some pro-road thought in all three states.

Rick Bronson, a lobbyist for the Maine East-West Highway Coalition thinks the tide of opinion in Maine has turned decisively against environmentalist opposition to roads and other forms of economic development. There is now strong public support for widening the Maine Turnpike, for example, whereas a decade ago environmentalists successfully blocked this badly needed improvement in the south of the state. But Bronson immediately says the ME-W Hwy will be a political fight with greens every step of the way.

“They come out from behind every tree,” he joked. And he may have US govt green regulators to contend with also! But it is a fight that Bronson and others think they can win. (Contacts Sandy Blitz ME-W Hwy Assoc 207 990 3109, Laurie Lachance State Plan Office 207 287 1479 laurie.lachance@state.me.us, Richard Mueller Univ Maine 207 581 1864 mueller@maine.maine.edu, Gary Mongeon RKG 603 868 5513 glm@rkg1.com, Carl Croce ME DOT 207 287 3131) (See also TRnl#22 Dec 97 p3)