Is it time to stop promoting annual visitation numbers to parks? This is a line of visitors waiting to scale Angels Landing in Zion National Park last summer/NPS
Another year of estimated visitation numbers has been released by the National Park Service. As unreliable, unhelpful, and unsustainable as the numbers are, the head counts should be tossed aside.
First of all, the numbers are estimates. Weak ones at that. Park staff acknowledges that.
If you go to the Park Service's Visitor Use Statistics website, pick a park page, whether that of your favorite park, or by random. Then click on the link for "Monthly Visitation Comments By Park" and you'll find notes made by staff concerning monthly visitation counts. Some notes simply refer to weather conditions, or mention a campground being shut down or opened for the season. But more than a few also cite issues with visitation counts.
For example, go to the comment page for Blue Ridge Parkway and you'll learn that for every month of 2019 problems with traffic counters led to estimates being used for the tallies. At Great Smoky Mountains National Park, vehicles that travel the Newfound Gap Road (Highway 441) between Tennessee and North Carolina are counted even if they don't stop to visit the park.
Parks that cited 2019 counting problems included Zion National Park ("All these numbers are not accurate due to government shutdown from January 1-27."), Shenandoah National Park ("Counters at Front Royal and Rockfish Entrace stations have not work because of repaving the road. Using a number from the cash register at Rockfish and Front Royal Station."), Natchez Trace Parkway ("Some traffic counts have been estimated," was a monthly refrain from this park last year), Carlsbad Caverns National Park ("Traffic counter apparently has been broken since July. Traffic counts are estimated."), and Cape Cod National Seashore ("The following five-year averages were used: Campers--no figures received; Fort Hill, Doane Rock, Great Island, Airport, Nauset Light Beach -- non-functioning traffic counters.").
Also greatly affecting visitation, of course, are hurricanes, ice storms, wildfires, and solar eclipses, so why place so much value on the annual visitation numbers? Do visitor counts, as soft as they are and as widely fluctuating as they can be due to matters out of the park's hands, really matter?
True, they often are used for economic boosterism.
“Parkway tourism across Virginia’s Blue Ridge is a mainstay to our local economy,” said Catherine Fox, vice president of public affairs and destination development of Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge, the Roanoke Valley region’s official destination marketing organization, after the latest numbers came out. “Tourism leaders in this region are pleased to see that Parkway tourism in Virginia continues to grow.”
More visitors mean more business and tax revenues, certainly, but visitors are overrunning more than a few parks, where natural and staff resources are being overtaxed and adversely impacted, and touting the "popularity" of this park or that park with hopes of luring even more visitors adds greater threat and actually risks turning off visitors who don't welcome the hordes.
A typical summer scene at Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park/NPS, Neal Herbert
"Went to Yosemite last year and I swear worse than Disneyland. Busloads of people, no parking, trash everywhere, you could not even take one picture without having 100 strangers in it ....never again!" Nadja Nadal wrote on Traveler's Facebook page. "I must say they should limit the amount of people entering the parks each day and give priority passes to the people who pay the taxes to keep the parks running!"
"I’m a NP junkie but won’t go anymore - too crowded and too many stupid people taunting animals and trashing the parks!" added Dorothy Weitzel Meinhold.
There are real problems with constantly pushing for higher visitation. They include adding to maintenance issues, impacting resources, and stressing an already stressed park staff. Too, it ignores the Park Service's long ago directive from Congress to establish human carrying capacities for individual parks. For those old enough to remember, it was the National Parks and Recreation Act of 1978 that directed park superintendents to identify in their park's general management plans "visitor carrying capacities for all areas of the unit." A few parks have, most haven't.
Of course, calling for a carrying capacity is one thing; figuring out what it should be is quite another, as former Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk told me in 2015.
“Is it a carrying capacity based on looking at the roads and the pullouts and the facilities in the park? Is it a carrying capacity that says how many people can you put in as long as you don’t have any resource degradation going on? Is it a social carrying capacity?" he said. "Is it OK to have 3,000 or 4,000 people standing around waiting for Old Faithful to go off, standing there like they’re packed into a stadium for a college or high school or professional football or basketball game? Is that OK? Is that the experience they expect? Or is it a carrying capacity that has to do with front country and backcountry trails. Is a half-hour wait to see a grizzly bear if you’re in a car the right amount of time, or is that too long. Or should you have to wait at all?
“We have a couple carrying capacities I think to deal with. One of them is social carrying capacity, and the other one is the park’s carrying capacity in terms of the ecology of the park and what we’re doing to the resource.”
Yet another carrying capacity is the one that satisfies the businesses in gateway communities.
While the visitation numbers often are worn like badges of honor, wouldn't it be better to shine some light on the backlog of maintenance needs in the parks with hopes that park goers, rather than simply planning their vacation to a popular park, would grow concerned about the maintenance problems and put pressure on their Congressional representatives to do something about them? Imagine if every February, instead of releasing park visitation numbers, the National Park Service released each park's maintenance backlog number. Create a national competition to see which park's number actually was reduced from year to year, and build pride around that, instead of around a number that threatens a park's integrity.
Why not, when the annual visitation tallies are released, attach a park's estimated maintenance backlog number alongside?
So next to Golden Gate's estimated 2019 visitation of 15,002,227 you'd see $323,803,049, which was the backlog estimate from 2018 (latest available figure).
Blue Ridge Parkway? $212,702,891.
Great Smoky Mountains? $162,773,003 on the Tennessee side, $73,122,970 on the North Carolina side.
Yellowstone, which welcomed 4,020,288 last year, carries an estimated maintenance backlog of $563,423,673. Yosemite's visitor tally, which soared some 400,000 from 2018 to 2019, when the total was estimated at 4,422,861, would be paired with an estimated maintenance tab of $645,657,601.
Of course, if Congress won't tackle the 2018 estimated maintenance backlog of $11,920,058,668 in the park system, maybe we just charge those 327.5 million who visited the parks last year $36.40 each. Sound like a plan?
Comments
"First of all, the numbers are estimates. Weak ones at that. Park staff acknowledges that."
I checked the 'Monthy Visitation Comments' for familiar NW parks and Kurt has nailed it. Both Olympic and Rainier note frequent traffic counter malfunctions, even theft! Closures seem the next most common entries and the overall tone is that the substitute estimates based on long-term averages might be too low.
I presume the traffic counter totals are divided by two to arrive at vehicle numbers, which are then multiplied by the presumed average number of occupants, often about three. Larger parks may track buses separately, but I suspect many units do not, which might tend to undercount visitors. Vehicles towing trailers might inflate the counts slightly.
Olympic National Park includes two sections of US 101, the only highway that circles the Olympic Peninsula. Both sections have traffic counters that are seasonally factored; 80% are considered park visitors in summer. This seems high to me. One of the many log trucks from the northern peninsula taking a load to Aberdeen might be double-counted twice because of its trailer.
Especially when applied to supposed economic activiity, the major inaccuracies in Olympic's estimates stem from the fact that they count visits, not visitors. Most visitors probably enter and leave the park several times each day. It would be possible for a single visitor staying overnight in Port Angeles to tag Hurricane Ridge, Elwha, Lake Crescent, Soleduc, Rialto Beach, and Hoh Rain Forest, spend the night at Kalaloch, and be counted as about twenty visits.
Major theme parks charge hundreds of dollars for various sorts of tickets. While I am all for making sure all can have access to our treasured parks, it seems there could be much higher entry fees. And perhaps at those where there are traffic. Issues, incentivize parking outside the park.and entering in a bus. In such cases, you want your own car it's like getting a priority pass at a theme park...you pay extra.
The parks are wonderful and the folks who work at those parks are great! Let's keep it this way.
With regards to questions on what visitor capacities should be in national parks, if you haven't seen it I suggest you look at the Interagency Visitor Use Management Council's Visitor Capacity Guidebook, Edition One. The guidebook, in combination with the council's Visitor Use Management Framework and position paper on visitor capacity, is how the NPS and other land management agencies like the US Forest Service and BLM, are approaching the vexing questions of what visitor capacity is and how to set capacities in different parks. The guidebook is available on the Council's web site: https://visitorusemanagement.nps.gov/VUM/Framework
Most major parks have extensive traffic problems,both in lack of adequate parking and in roadway/pull-off congestion. Most visitors hit the high points within the parks in 1-3 days, but create most of the congestion problems. I agree that where feasible, electric/propane trams or buses should be utilized and contracted out to the private sector, and charging a premium to those who want to use their cars. It won't work in all parks, though.