You are here

"Adaptive Management" Key To Success Of Acadia National Park's Transit Plan

Share
Shuttle bus at Acadia National Park/NPS, Gregg TeHennepe

Implementing Acadia National Park's transportation plan won't begin on the ground until 2020, and then take years to complete/NPS, Gregg TeHennepe

With the ink having dried on the National Park Service document approving Acadia National Park's plan for managing traffic, the hard work of figuring out how best to implement the plan is just getting under way.

Perhaps the good news for both park visitors and park staff is that the plan won't be implemented for the coming summer season. That not only means travelers won't have to worry about making a reservation to enter some sections of the park, but it also gives Acadia's staff time to carefully figure out how best to implement the plan.

The plan calls for introduction of a "timed-entry" reservation system, one that will give visitors a specific window to enter Acadia from mid-June to mid-October. Initially, areas requiring such reservations could include the Ocean Drive corridor, Cadillac Summit Road, and the Jordan Pond North Lot. The idea is that through such a reservation system parking areas in Acadia wouldn't be overwhelmed by visitors' vehicles.

“We’re having conversations in the park about, what’s this going to look like? Do we just do one of the three sites in 2020 and kind of see how it goes? If we do do that, which site makes the most sense?" Christie Anastasia, the park's spokeswoman, told me last week. "We don’t really know at this point. These are the kinds of conversations we’re having right now. The final transportation plan just gives us a blueprint for the future. Now we really have to start looking at the complexities of implementing it and kind of figuring out the logistics on the ground.”

As Acadia's planning progresses, it would be not surprising to see other park managers in the National Park System taking notes. Crowds have become a hallmark at some national parks in recent years. As they arrive, they can diminish the "national park experience" due to congestion on roadways, and have detrimental impacts on natural resources. Those impacts can range from parking along road shoulders that creeps beyond the shoulders and more litter to vandalism.

Elsewhere in the National Park System, both Arches and Zion national parks in Utah are working on their own crowd-management plans, and Yellowstone National Park officials, who in 2017 opened a nearly 1-acre gravel parking area near the Fairy Falls Trail in a bid to reduce illegal parking along the road shoulders, continue to search for solutions to overcrowding.

Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly last week said improving the visitor experience was one of his top priorities, to "provide clarity and direction around how the park will handle increased visitation in upcoming years – with special focus on visitor impacts on resources, staffing and infrastructure, visitor experience, and gateway communities."

"Importantly, the park is moving out of the data gathering phase and beginning to determine the appropriate short and long-term actions necessary to protect resources, mitigate impacts of congestion, and improve educational, recreational, and other visitor enjoyment opportunities," Sholly said. "This priority also focuses heavily on improving public safety and resource protection."

There are few parks with reservation systems. Muir Woods National Monument in California implemented one for parking. You also buy tickets to tour the Statute of Liberty, to enter Independence Hall National Historical Park from March through December, to wander through Alcatraz Island and its prison, to visit the USS Arizona. But by and large, most parks are free to enter and require no reservations; not quite a quarter of the 419 units of the National Park System ask that you pay a fee to enter.

Acadia's plan is designed to keep the parking area atop Cadillac Mountain from being overwhelmed/NPS

But if visitation levels continue to grow, without solutions for spreading the visitors out, either through the entire park system or through all 12 months of the year, the Park Service staff will continue to be strained and the threat to park resources and the park experience will continue to grow.

Back at Acadia off Maine's Atlantic coast, one of the keys to putting the transit plan into effect, said Anastasia, is staying flexible and able to react to unforeseen consequences.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen, and so part of the transportation plan is that it’s an adaptive management plan," she pointed out. "There are certain assumptions in place in terms of how many cars can enter a certain area for a reservation. Do we assume 5 percent of the people aren’t going to show up, or 10 percent of the people aren’t going to show up? We know the average length of time that people stay at or in locations. But is that length of time going to change now that someone has paid to kind of occupy that parking spot in which they don’t have to leave at any certain time?

“So some of those things are known, and some of those things are unknown. As we go through those things, we’re envisioning that we’re going to have to adaptively manage these things," continued Anastasia. "For example, if we see a parking lot that previously hasn’t had a congestion issue that starts to (have one), we might start to manage that, but management doesn’t necessary mean automatically that that parking lot is on a reservation system. There’s sort of a continuum of managing actions that can continue to happen.”

And it's highly likely changes will be required from time to time, for a variety of reasons:

* Will the timed-entry plan Acadia settles on drive traffic, and congestion, to parts of the park not initially involved in the reservation system?

* How will visitors who enter the park in the early morning hours, without a reservation, and find a parking spot in one of the reservation lots be handled?

* Will scalping of reservations come up?

* How will the park handle motorists with reservations who are delayed for some reason in traveling to the park and show up after their entry window passes?

Many, if not all, of those issues have been considered by park staff. The key, said Anastasia, is remaining flexible to deal with adverse consequences. For example, to address issues with too many vehicles for parking spaces, more Island Explorer shuttles could be run through the park; more stringent parking enforcement could be implemented; more bike rentals could be authorized; more sections of the park could be placed under the reservation system.

One approach the park intends to take is to hold back a small number of reservations for visitors who arrive at the spur of the moment, so to speak, without a reservation.

"I think what we really want to do is the minimum management action to achieve the desire of balancing the park resources and the park experience," Anastasia said.

The approved plan includes more than just a roadmap for handling vehicle traffic. It calls for new parking lot construction at a variety of locations, including the Acadia Gateway Center, Eagle Lake, and potentially at a variety of other locations on western Mount Desert Island, the planning document notes. Expanded parking is also planned for Hulls Cove, where the visitors center would be reconfigured. Improved cellular service would be sought, too, so visitors who take taxis or Uber or Lyft into the park or are dropped off by friends or family could summon them when they're ready to leave.

Of course, as with any other project in the National Park System, how quickly Acadia's transportation management plan (which cost roughly $700,000 to develop) is fully implemented depends on when, and if, funding is made available.

A record of decision does not guarantee funds or staff for implementing the approved plan. The National Park Service recognizes that this is a long-term plan; in the framework of the plan, park managers would take incremental steps to reach park management goals and objectives. The park would actively seek alternative sources of funding, but there is no guarantee that all the components of the plan would be implemented.

You can find the entire management plan document here.

Add comment

CAPTCHA

This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.

The Essential RVing Guide

The Essential RVing Guide to the National Parks

The National Parks RVing Guide, aka the Essential RVing Guide To The National Parks, is the definitive guide for RVers seeking information on campgrounds in the National Park System where they can park their rigs. It's available for free for both iPhones and Android models.

This app is packed with RVing specific details on more than 250 campgrounds in more than 70 parks.

You'll also find stories about RVing in the parks, some tips if you've just recently turned into an RVer, and some planning suggestions. A bonus that wasn't in the previous eBook or PDF versions of this guide are feeds of Traveler content: you'll find our latest stories as well as our most recent podcasts just a click away.

So whether you have an iPhone or an Android, download this app and start exploring the campgrounds in the National Park System where you can park your rig.