WATERVILLE (AP) – Cost concerns and shifts in driving habits have fueled a decline in the number of highway rest areas in Maine that have provided generations of weary travelers with parking spaces, toilets and picnic tables under the pines.

Six years after the Maine Department of Transportation started to reassess the roughly 90 rest areas on secondary roads, about 25 have been closed and a number of others have been converted into scenic turnouts or are still available in some capacity, said Bob LaRoche, MDOT supervisor of landscape architecture.

That leaves 50 rest areas, not counting the eight that the department maintains on Interstate 95, he said.

While it costs about $5,000 per year to maintain each rest area, LaRoche said money is not the sole motivation for the closures. They also reflect cultural changes from the 1950s and 1960s, when many of the rest areas were built, he said.

“At that time people packed a picnic basket and that’s how they traveled,” he said. “Now, with fast food everywhere, they tend to be more of a rest stop as opposed to a picnic area. We had some fairly urban areas that, from our standpoint, from a traffic safety standpoint, were not needed.”

Rest areas in sparsely populated areas of Aroostook County, where there are few other options for stopping to take a rest break, are more likely to remain open even though traffic there is light.

Rest areas in places with higher traffic, such as the one on U.S. 2 in Pittsfield which was closed at the end of last year, are not as likely to survive the cut.

MaryJane Crawford of Madison was unhappy at the changes after comparing the availability of rest stops on Aroostook highways with that on roads closer to home.

“Every rest area up there is open and we hardly met a car on the road,” Crawford said. “It’s so ridiculous that up there in the boonies they have all those rest areas open, (but) from Newport to Canaan there’s no place. There are no restaurants or anything.”

A key criterion in determining which areas will close is their proximity to restaurants or convenience stores where motorists can feel comfortable pulling over, although some spots with picturesque views are often kept as scenic overlooks.

“The DOT’s mission (is) to provide a place to pull off the side of the road and rest,” LaRoche said.

Some of the savings from the closings has been pumped into improving the bathroom facilities at the remaining areas, LaRoche said. Improving the bathrooms, and reducing odors, has allowed the DOT to move the facilities closer to the parking lot, thus cutting back on vandalism.

“We want to do a good job on the rest areas we have, but since funding is always an issue, if there were rest areas we didn’t need, that money could be used on the remaining rest areas,” LaRoche said. “We’re trying to get down to a manageable size where we can take care of the ones we have.”