Memorial Day travel may not be memorable for Maine businesses
Photo / William Hall
On Friday morning, usually the start of a busy weekend for travel before Memorial Day, traffic on the Maine Turnpike near Portland was light in both directions.
Despite favorable weather predictions and record-low gas prices, Maine’s usual boom in car travel over the Memorial Day weekend looks more like a bust.
Officials expect holiday traffic on the Maine Turnpike to be down 30% from last year’s level of about 1 million, according to a news release Thursday. Such low volumes haven’t been recorded since 2000.
The Memorial Day weekend is the traditional start of the summer tourism season in Maine. Many of the state’s businesses rely on the annual influx of visitors, who often arrive via the 109-mile toll highway between York and Augusta.
But the coronavirus crisis has decimated travel on the Turnpike, like other major thoroughfares across the U.S., as stay-at-home orders, quarantine requirements and business shutdowns have forced many Americans to keep their cars in the driveway.
By mid-March, just days after the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the state, traffic had already fallen as much as 20%, Maine Turnpike Authority Executive Director Peter Mills then told Mainebiz. In April, traffic was down by almost 54%, the authority said Thursday.
Reflecting modest growth in its use before the pandemic hit, the Turnpike’s year-to-date traffic volume is 18% below the level for the same period in 2019.
The pandemic has wreaked so much havoc on interstate car travel that for the first time in 20 years, AAA will not issue a Memorial Day travel forecast. The motorist assistance organization said Thursday that the “accuracy of the economic data used to create the forecast has been undermined by COVID-19.”
However, there may be some reason for optimism. Forecasts call for generally sunny conditions across much of the state over the weekend, and some regions could see their first 80-degree temperatures. And due in part to the pandemic, filling the tank is cheap. Gasoline continues to cost well below $2 a gallon throughout Maine, the lowest price levels in four years.
Mills is also optimistic, noting a slight uptick at the tolls.
“The good news is, we are beginning to see traffic come back,” he said in the release. “We’ve seen incremental increases in weekday traffic already and with a sunny forecast everywhere in Maine this weekend, we suspect there will be more people on the road than we’ve seen since the outbreak began.”
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Obviously out of state people are not paying any attention to Gov. Mills. New Hampshire and Mass. plates are flooding into the State of Maine starting yesterday. I am sure they are not planning to quarantine for 2 weeks.
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