Getting Around on the Eastern Shore
Someone who’s moved to the Eastern Shore will quickly notice how few options there are for getting around.
City dwellers take for granted buses, subways, light rail, taxis, and rail and air services. For most Shore dwellers, any destination beyond walking distance usually means using your car, sharing a ride, or calling a taxi, an Uber, or the equivalent found in most local communities.
It wasn’t always like this. It will surprise some readers to learn that as late as the 1960s, there was regular passenger train service in Chestertown, with stops in Worton, Kennedyville, and other small Kent County towns. You could take the train to Wilmington, Del., with connections from there to the rest of the country.
With this link to the outside world, Chestertown was by no means unique. In the heyday of rail travel in the mid-20th century, you could board a passenger train in Centreville, Easton, Salisbury, Cambridge, Ocean City, and many smaller towns. Most branch lines on the Shore were maintained by the Pennsylvania Railroad. But nowadays, even the tracks in many communities have been taken up to make way for walking and biking trails. Freight service is still available for some parts of the Shore, the only vestige of what was once the lifeline of commerce in these parts.
The other all-but-vanished means of travel for Shore dwellers is by water. The peninsula’s numerous rivers once provided easy access for ships of all sizes to carry passengers and freight from Shore towns to Annapolis Baltimore, and beyond. The freight dock in Chestertown was often busy when I was a kid. And you don’t have to be all that old to remember when the Love Point ferry was a vital leg of everyone’s journey from the Western Shore to Ocean City. The Bay bridge killed it off, along with the passenger boats bringing vacationers from Baltimore to the resort towns of Betterton and Tolchester. There was, for a while in the 2010s, talk of a high speed ferry from Rock Hall to Baltimore, but it apparently never got off the drawing board. More recently, a feasibility study was commissioned by Anne Arundel, Queen Anne’s, Somerset, Charles, and St. Mary’s counties for ferry service across the Bay; results of that study have not yet been made public.
Greyhound or Trailways buses are generally available in the larger towns on the peninsula. Greyhound stops in Elkton, Kent Island, Easton, Salisbury, and Princess Anne. Trailways stops only in Elkton and Salisbury, although it had service to Chestertown as recently as the 1990s. While many residents need a lift to the closest bus station, for a lot of us they’re closer and thus more convenient than the railroad stations in Wilmington or on the Western Shore. Click here for Greyhound information; here for Trailways.
For more local service, several bus companies serve much of the area. Delmarva Community Transit covers Caroline, Dorchester, Kent, Queen Anne’s, and Talbot counties, with service five days a week and partial coverage on Saturdays. Shore Transit covers Somerset, Wicomico, and Worcester counties, with stops in Salisbury and Ocean City as well as smaller towns on the lower Shore. Some of the companies will arrange special pickups for seniors. But for many prospective passengers, infrequent pickups — often only twice a day — means they must leave at inconvenient times and often must kill several hours before the return trip.
Finally, almost every community offers some kind of car service for anything from a supermarket trip to an airport dropoff. Lyft and Uber are the best known of these, but there are also locally owned taxis and limos everywhere on the Shore. For something like an airport trip, you can arrange to be picked up when you return. Searching with your zip code should turn up several possibilities, but often a friend or neighbor can recommend one they’ve found to be reliable.
Given the small population of most Shore counties, there seems to be no economic incentive for installing significant mass transit services. There is occasional talk of putting in a high-speed rail link from the western shore to Ocean City to reduce the traffic on Route 50 at peak summer hours. A similar connection from Wilmington would also make sense. But those ideas are only speculative, and unless someone can make money from them, they’re probably not going to happen.
Thanks to Henry Ford and his competitors, most are used to the convenience of using their own car for most travel, local or otherwise. Getting a bus or train ride from your town on the Shore to somewhere in Florida or on the west coast sounds attractive, but it still leaves open the issue of how to get around at your destination. Unless you’re in a major city, or can bum a ride from friends or relatives, you’re going to have to rent a car, or spring for an Uber or taxi.
For now, transportation on the Shore is inexorably tied to motor vehicles. Yes, some of us are bike riders, and a few, such as the Amish, still hitch a horse to a buggy. But for most of us, getting around means owning a car — which nowadays costs more than a starter home used to — or getting a ride from someone.
Not everyone has or wants a car. Trains and buses produce significantly less pollution than autos and provide accessible travel for everyone. It would be nice to think there’s some better answer waiting to be found.
Peter Heck is a Chestertown-based writer and editor, who spent 10 years at the Kent County News and three more with the Chestertown Spy. He is the author of 10 novels and co-author of four plays, a book reviewer for Asimov’s and Kirkus Reviews, and an incorrigible guitarist.
Common Sense for the Eastern Shore
