Balancing Commerce and the Environment in America’s National Parks

FAMOUSLY CANTANKEROUS ECOACTIVIST Edward Abbey railed against the National Park Service in his 1968 classic, Desert Solitaire, a memoir about his time spent as a ranger in Arches National Monument. In a section titled “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks,” Abbey re-dubbed the park “Arches Natural Money-mint” and decried its commercialization.

Of special concern to Abbey was the public’s reliance on automobiles to visit the parks and the increased damage to natural landscapes that car traffic brought. Abbey thought that the Parks Department, seeking a higher volume of visitors, sacrificed land management on the altar of commerce. In his less politically correct moments, Abbey suggested that if disallowing cars in the parks meant that the infirm and children would be kept out, so be it. “Children … need only wait a few years–if they are not run over by automobiles, they will grow into a lifetime of joyous adventure,” he wrote. “The aged merit even less sympathy: after all, they had the opportunity to see the country when it was still relatively unspoiled.”

Abbey proposed fixing the park system’s congestion problems “by the simple expedient of requiring all visitors, at the park entrance, to lock up their automobiles and continue their tour on the seats of good workable bicycles provided free of charge by the United States government.” He also advised placing a moratorium on the construction of new roads in parks.

If Abbey railed against the volume of traffic in the parks forty years ago, he must be turning in his grave today. The problem of car abuse in the national parks has become apparent to anyone visiting a high-profile natural wonder in the height of the summer season. For instance, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), an organization which advocates for the parks and the National Park Service, reports that in Great Smokey Mountains National Park in Tennessee, it can take six hours to drive an eleven-mile loop on a heavily visited day. According to the Sierra Club, smog has reduced the visibility of scenic areas by 80 percent. In the Grand Canyon, on busy summer days, 6,000 cars compete for 2,500 parking spots. In Yosemite, adds the Sierra Club, “over an eleven-year study period, bad air levels in the park exceeded those found in many major metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, New York, and Houston.” Steps Toward a Solution

In 1998, the Transportation Equity Act (TEA-21) authorized a federal 18.4 cents per gallon gas tax. From that revenue, $165 million was earmarked annually for the general use of the National Park Service. The parks authority set aside a small portion of these funds to tackle problems of overuse and congestion.

One of the programs set into motion by TEA-21 money is the National Park Service’s Alternative Transportation Program (ATP), which helps parks create and execute alternative transportation plans. The ATP has had notable success in some parks: the NPCA’s website cites the stellar example of Maine’s Acadia National Park, which implemented a propane-fueled bus system called Island Explorer in 1999. In the first year of the system’s use, “the Air Bureau of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection estimates that the program reduce[d] park nitrous oxide pollution by 2 tons, hydrocarbons by 4 tons, carbon monoxide by 32 tons, and carbon dioxide by 522 tons–amounts roughly equal to the output of a small power plant.”

But that kind of success story has not been repeated across the spectrum. TEA-21’s $165 million is not enough to implement good public transport at every park. According to the NPCA, America’s national parks received only two-thirds of the overall funding they actually need.

Congress, meanwhile, reduced funding for the Alternative Transportation Program. The August 10, 2005, reauthorization of TEA–now called The Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act—A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU)–will dole out $96.9 million for alternative transportation in parks by 2009. According to the NPCA, however, this figure falls woefully short: “A study released last year by the Federal Transit Authority documented that $1.6 billion will be needed over the next 20 years to meet the National Park Service’s alternative transportation needs such as the development of shuttle bus systems.” Getting On the Bus at Glacier

Glacier National Park, for instance, wants to institute a public bus system that could minimize auto use among the park’s 1 million annual visitors, 90 percent of whom arrive in automobiles. Since Amtrak currently serves both sides of Glacier, an eventual goal is to enable visitors to take a train to the park and then connect to a bus, providing the option of a completely car-free experience.

At the moment, however, Glacier can only maintain a minimal public transportation schedule. The park concessioner, Glacier Park, Inc., runs 32 historic red touring buses, the “red jammers,” which were built in the 1930s and put back in use in 2001 after being refurbished by the Ford Motor Company–an effort cited by the Alternative Transportation Program as one of its success stories. Visitors can sign up for a guided interpretive tour, at a cost of $30 to $75, but with a considerable downside: being stuck onboard for three to five hours.

Hikers now have the additional option of taking the park’s “hiker shuttle,” which crosses the park making stops at several trailheads. According to Susan Low, the transportation planner for Glacier, “Going-to-the-Sun Road,” the dangerously narrow, 50-mile scenic thoroughfare that bisects the park “needs major rehabilitation work, and so there’s an eight- to ten-year construction project we’re planning right now. Our environmental impact statement says that we have to offset the negative impacts of the road’s construction by starting this new point-to-point system, but we hope it becomes institutionalized and remains part of the park even after the construction is done.” To get from one side of the park to the other, however, still takes almost three hours, at a cost of $16. It takes more money and time to continue traveling along the east side of the park after transferring to a different shuttle. The cross-park shuttle also only operates four times a day and seats only fifteen passengers.

Low and her fellow planners are also researching ways to run those buses on alternative fuel to reduce park pollution problems. “We’re looking at different types right now, from electric hybrid buses to biodiesel,” she says. Like Acadia’s Island Explorers and buses in use at Zion National Park, the red jammer buses use dual propane/gasoline engines. Propane has fewer emissions than gasoline, but is still not a very clean energy source and is much less fuel-efficient.

Naturally, the problem becomes the funding gap. “We think [the program is] going to cost about a million dollars a year to run, not including the cost of the buses,” says Low. “We’re looking at different alternatives, one of which would be an entry fee addition.” (The current entry fee is already $20, steep by national park standards, with an additional cost for the shuttle.) Another option is to create a concession pass which would be part of a package deal to be sold by participating hotels and retail merchants. The park could also raise transportation fares, but Low says, “if we completely charge what it costs, it would be too expensive and nobody would even ride it.”

Glacier has taken up Abbey’s bicycle idea on one level–employees can bike from building to building with free bikes provided by the park. But the program has not been extended to visitors. Learning From Urban Parks

While Low and her colleagues contend with the logistics of ferrying large numbers of people across expansive vistas, urban parks, striving to preserve their historic sites and the feeling of a bygone downtown, have found that congested surroundings can work to their advantage. Their methods of dealing with transportation problems are instructive for cities trying to bring visitors to attractions via public transport.

Lowell National Historical Park, in Lowell, Massachusetts, is a favorite site for schoolchildren on field trips and tourists looking to learn about the mill culture of 1800s New England. A trolley system was put in place in the 1980s and runs on about a mile and a half of track. It runs from downtown Lowell into the park, connects the visitor center with the exhibit sites, and eventually links up with boats that take visitors out to the canals and interpretive sites that are situated on the water. Visitors can also travel most of this route by foot, and the park has been working to expand the area people can walk to by building a river walkway.

The Alternative Transportation Program has recognized the Lowell site for successfully shifting visitors’ transportation of choice to the park’s system of historic trolleys and canal boats. Part of this success is due to the fact that people who visit simply don’t have other options. “You could drive, but there’s no parking,” says the Lowell National Park planner Chris Briggs. “You could drive around in circles for a while until you find a place at a meter. It’s much quicker just to use the trolley.” All of the trolley stops are also located close together, which makes getting where a visitor wants to go painless.

Relatively affordable because of the modest amount of ground to cover, the trolley system was constructed with money appropriated from the Department of the Interior, and the maintenance and upkeep costs, Briggs says, “now come from our annual operating budget.” Pending a feasibility study, the park now plans to extend its trolley system to connect with the major public transportation hub in town–the commuter rail. “Right now people can take the train to the terminal and then get on the downtown shuttle bus to get downtown,” says Briggs. “What we’re proposing is that the trolley could replace that shuttle bus, and it would provide the direct connection, so that people could get on right off the commuter rail and come to the park.” For cities with major attractions, such as stadiums or aquariums, Lowell’s plan might be instructive–make the transportation linkage to your attraction as simple as possible, and then people just might take the train instead of a car.

In Lowell, as in Glacier, the use of alternative transportation to preserve the beauty and well-being of the land, or the historic site, becomes increasingly desirable as the visitor volume goes up. Abbey’s years of observation as a park ranger led him to write that the Park Service slogan–“Parks Are For People”–“decoded, means that the parks are for people-in-automobiles. Behind the slogan is the assumption that the majority of Americans … expect and demand to see their national parks from the comfort, security, and convenience of their automobiles.” Changing that mindset is now a major challenge of the national parks. The question remains whether parks can find a way to adequately fund their efforts.

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire; A Season in the Wilderness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

Collins, Kevin. “A Week in the Life of Kevin Collins, National Parks Conservation Association.” Grist Magazine. Daily Grist: 30 Jul 2001 — 03 Aug 2001.

National Parks Conservation Association.

National Park Service’s Alternative Transport.