FAIRFAX RESIDENTS INTERVIEWED BY TIM JOHNSON

Car less: Part V -- Commuter community

Published: Sunday, August 28, 2005

By Tim Johnson
Free Press Staff Writer

FAIRFAX -- You can take your morning muffin to the table outside Foothills Bakery, but you might have trouble sustaining a conversation as you sit there.

The sounds of traffic come and go -- from ear-splitting 18-wheelers and gravel trucks to the white-gray noise of cars, SUVs and pickups, many of them driven by commuters bound for Burlington or St. Albans. (Burlington is about a 25-mile drive south; St. Albans, 10 miles north). There are interludes of silence along Vermont 104, the main drag through town that passes by the bakery, but they never last long.

People who live along 104 will tell you that the traffic never really lets up, 24 hours a day, and lifelong residents remark -- with a mixture of amusement and resignation -- that sometimes it's a challenge just to get across the road. It wasn't like that a generation ago.

The town isn't what it was, either. Fairfax used to be a farm town. Now it's a bedroom town, one of the fastest-growing in the state. The transformation accelerated over the last 25 years; it's still going on.

At the center of this evolution is the automobile. Fairfax has many more cars than in the old days, and they're being driven more often, and much farther than before.

With these changes, Fairfax typifies Vermont. In the past quarter-century, Vermont has become a state of commuters.

Town in flux

American drivers spend, on average, slightly more than one hour a day behind the wheel, according to the 2001 National Household Travel Survey. No such figure is available for Vermont, but it stands to reason that average driving time is roughly the same in this state.

After all, the average one-way commute for Vermont workers -- 75 percent of whom drive to work alone -- takes 21.6 minutes, according to the 2000 U.S. Census, about 4 minutes less than the national average.

Commuting increased substantially in Vermont from 1980 to 2000, as the state continued evolving away from an economy based on farms, forests and quarries. In 1980, slightly more than half the workers 16 and older were employed outside the towns or cities where they lived. In 2000, almost two-thirds worked elsewhere, and they were taking an additional five minutes to get there.

Apart from a lumber company, Fairfax has no industry -- and by most accounts, no desire to attract any. Nor is there much commerce -- a restaurant, a drugstore and a hardware store, all south of the village along the highway, and several other small businesses. Even in the old days, there wasn't much employment here off the farm.

The farms are disappearing, as in the rest of Vermont. Twenty-nine remain; there used to be more than a hundred, said Donna Meunier, town clerk, who grew up on one. Replacing the farms are houses, subdivisions and hundreds of newcomers to live in them. From 1980 to 2000 the town's population almost doubled to 3,527 people. Of the population in 2000, 40 percent had come from some other town within the previous five years.

"When we revise the voter checklist," said Doug Webb, a Selectboard member and a lifelong resident, "we just don't know many of the people any more."

Henry Raymond, a retired IBM employee who has lived in town since 1953, said: "I have neighbors I've never met. Every time I go down to the village, I see someone I've never seen before."

The new households are headed by commuters. If they can afford the new houses in Fairfax -- the median price last year was $179,000 -- they can probably afford two or three cars. In Fairfax, as in the rest of Vermont, the average household size has gone down, and average number of cars per household has gone up. In 2000, almost half of Fairfax households had two cars, and an additional quarter had three or more cars.

The town's growth has been a boon, of sorts, to Mark Rainville, a former Selectboard and School Board member. He grew up on a farm, too. Now he owns Rainville's Collision & Repair.

With a new development of about 20 homes going in on the north side of the village, Rainville said, he finds himself thinking of it in business terms: "That's at least two cars or three cars per household."

The social fabric

In his 2000 book, "Bowling Alone," Robert D. Putnam charts the decline of civic engagement and social connectedness among Americans over the previous three decades. He itemizes startling, across-the-board drops in political, civic-association and religious participation, and even in informal socializing, from card playing to after-work schmoozing.

In attempting to account for this, Putnam adduces several major reasons: "pressures of time and money" (overwork, declining real wages); "technology and mass media" (increasing time in front of the TV); and a generational shift (baby boomers less civically engaged than their parents). But he also points to Americans' mobility and lengthening commutes.

"The car and the commute," Putnam writes, "are demonstrably bad for community life. In round numbers, the evidence suggests that each additional 10 minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by 10 percent -- fewer public meetings attended, fewer committees chaired, fewer petitions signed, fewer church services attended, less volunteering, and so on."

So, what about Vermont?

In "Real Democracy," an exhaustive study of town meeting in Vermont, the University of Vermont's Frank Bryan offers a nuanced argument that this form of political participation is alive and well -- somewhat contrary to trends of political participation elsewhere. But Bryan also acknowledges: "Commuter-based lifestyles and other demographic and institutional dislocations have raised havoc with Vermont's town-based society."

Echoing one of Bryan's conclusions, Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz said that the level of civic engagement remains high in small, rural communities. She suggested car dependency might have a more serious effect on civic life in suburbs, where keeping commuters engaged in their home towns can be more of a challenge.

"The other thing about the car is, it opens up our options," she said. "Instead of going to church, you can choose a movie in Williston. The institutions that created social capital in our communities are having a hard time surviving because of the competition."

How has the commuter influx affected civic engagement in Fairfax? The picture isn't as clear as Putnam's book might imply.

One of the Selectboard members, Ed Nuttall, suggested recently that many of the newer, commuting residents felt less affinity for the town and as a result were less likely to do volunteer work. (He was referring specifically to construction of a town park.) Nuttall said later that he was reiterating what he'd been hearing from some of the town's old-timers.

Others in town, including some old-timers, take issue with Nuttall's characterization. Churches and the school, Bellows Free Academy, seem to do all right for volunteers, Webb said. Raymond pointed out that there were plenty of unfamiliar faces among the organizers of the Egg Run, the annual fund-raiser for the park, which drew more participants than usual this year.

Still, one mark of Fairfax's suburbanization came in the early '90s, when the annual town meeting was shifted from the traditional Tuesday to Saturday, coupled with an Australian ballot (or daylong paper ballot) for the town budget. As Bryan points out, the Australian ballot effectively discourages town meeting attendance; it is, in part, a convenience for commuters, who can vote without attending the meeting in person.

In Fairfax, the Saturday town meeting still decides some of the town's business. Attendance is typically about 100 to 150, according to Meunier, out of about 2,590 registered voters.

Vanishing hangouts

Within living memory, Fairfax was more than just an expansive farm town. Like many rural Vermont communities, it was also an accretion of places scattered along the roads outside the village -- Huntville, Buck Hollow, North Fairfax -- each with its own post office, schoolhouse.

Now those places are mostly gone, except in the memories of older residents. The locations are still there, but a visitor can easily drive through without knowing that they each used to have a community identity.

Raymond recalls how, as a young man, he would spend part of his Saturdays hanging out at a barbershop in the village. If he needed food, there were two grocery stores. In those days, Fairfax was more self-sustaining -- you could get most of what you needed in town.

The grocery stores have been gone for years, and today, the nearest supermarkets are in St. Albans, Milton and Essex Junction.

The only hangout left in the village is the bakery. But then, people aren't moving to Fairfax because it's a social center. Much of the town's newfound appeal, rather, lies in its accessibility -- easy to get to, easy to get out of.

That can be a mixed blessing. Vermont 104, which connects to the Vermont 15/U.S. 2 corridor, gets a good deal of traffic from Canada bound for New Hampshire and Maine. That explains many of the big trucks rolling past the bakery. Throw in the burgeoning commuter flows, and the traffic past the bakery has more than doubled in the past 20 years, by the state's count.

All of which raises an unfamiliar prospect in the village: traffic backups. The Northwest Regional Planning Commission has started thinking about doing a "scoping" study on how to deal with congestion, if it happens. Stoplight? Roundabout?

Meanwhile, the town's convenience stores do a good business.

Peter Parkash and his family have operated Nan's, a Mobil gas outlet and convenience store with a deli, just north of the village on 104, for five years. (He previously ran a Dunkin' Donuts franchise in New York City.) He said he gets about 800 customers a day; the peak times are around 8 a.m. and 3-5 p.m.

"We have a lot of commuters," he said. "It's a growing town, lots of traffic."

Contact Tim Johnson at 660-1808 or tjohnson@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com