National Parks: Too Much Love or Not the Right Kind?

By Madeline Bodin

Zion National Park, outside of Springdale, Utah, is fabulous — a vast desert canyon carved from pink, purple, and cream-colored rock. Its spires and arches have evoked other worldly visions for Native Americans and Mormons alike. Visitors flock to the park to hike, rock climb, explore slot canyons, or take a scenic drive.

In the 1990s, Zion attracted nearly two million visitors each year, which mathematically averages to 5,500 per day, although in reality many more visit during the summer months than in winter. But the park has only 848 parking spaces, and those spaces filled by 9 o'clock on busy mornings.

Building a huge parking lot at the entrance to the park was one way to accommodate visitors, but that solution came with many problems of its own. Was there a better way?

Ever since National Park visitor numbers began to surge following World War II, journalists have been complaining that our national parks are being loved to death.

Writer Bernard DeVoto may have been the first to express the sentiment in a 1953 article in Harper's magazine when he wrote, "the Service is suffering from financial anemia. . . . It is the impoverished stepchild of Congress," but he would not be the last. Both his list of complaints (long lines, potholes) and his praise (what the National Park Service does with its starvation rations is remarkable) are just as true today as they were more than 60 years ago.

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In 2013, there were 273.6 million total visits at the 401 parks, historic sites, and recreation areas in the National Park System, according to NPS statistics. And that was down 9.1 million visits from 2012 because of the 16-day government shutdown in October 2013 and because damage from 2012's Hurricane Sandy kept the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island closed into the following year.

Patrick Gregerson, chief of planning for NPS, does not like the word overcrowding, pointing out that two hikers on a remote trail in Denali National Park might feel like too many, while many national celebrations involve large gatherings on the National Mall and feel just right.

He says that the National Park Service recently joined with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bureau of Land Management to form the Interagency Visitor Use Management Council. These five federal agencies, which deal with both visitors and land management, are sharing their best practices. He expects several white papers detailing those practices to be out by the end of 2014.

The National Park Service budget attracts more than its share of attention in talks about the federal budget and deficit spending, as media coverage of the October 2013 federal government shutdown illustrated. The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2005, U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo of California and his staff considered selling off 15 national parks and the naming rights for visitors centers and hiking trails to raise federal revenues. In 2012, U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida proposed selling off some national parks to raise money to maintain the others.

With all the chatter it may be hard to grasp that the NPS budget makes up a mere 0.06 percent (1/15th of a percent) of the federal budget, according to the National Park Conservation Association, a nongovernmental advocate for national parks.

Although the number of visits has remained steady over the last 10 years, according to National Park Service statistics, the agency's operating budget has dropped by 13 percent in the last three years, after adjusting for inflation, according to NPCA. Underfunding means that NPS's budget shortfall exceeds $500 million a year.

The biggest hit, again according to NPCA, has been to the park construction account, which is down 69 percent over the last decade, contributing to a deferred maintenance backlog of $12 billion. If you imagine this deferred maintenance as leaking roofs in historic buildings and washed-out trails, you are only half right.

"Half of the deferred maintenance backlog is roads and transportation needs," says John Garder, NPCA's director of budget and appropriations. While national park transportation projects get funding from the national Highway Trust Fund, which is funded by fuel taxes, even that suffers from plummeting revenues, mostly because of increased vehicle fuel efficiency.

One recent example is the Arlington Memorial Bridge, in Washington, D.C., which NPS owns and maintains. The 81-year-old bridge suffers from deteriorated underpinnings, cracked balustrades, and corroded drawbridge supports, although it is considered safe for traffic, the Washington Post reported. The bridge carries 55,000 vehicles a day and will cost about $250,000 to repair.

New approaches

In Zion National Park, the transportation need was lots of new parking, or at least that is how it first appeared. The initial plan called for a shuttle to take visitors from a vast entrance parking lot to destinations within the park, but that plan was never ideal.

"Zion looks pretty much as it did 100 years ago" when it became a national park, says Jim Milestone, acting park superintendent. "The key for us as managers is that future generations get to see it unimpaired, the way it was in 1909." A big parking lot at the entrance would change the experience of millions of visitors.

There was another problem. Zion has a unique relationship with its gateway community, Springdale, Utah, which is located right outside the south entrance to the park. No long access road separates the two.

"In our planning we strive to blend the town and the park," says Tom Dansie, AICP, director of community development for Springdale. "When visitors arrive in the town, we want them to feel like they are already in the park. Our design guidelines strive to make buildings look more like what they will find in the park. Even the signage is similar.

"If they had the big parking lot, that would change that experience," says Dansie. Instead of a seamless flow from town to park, visitors would have to cross a glinting sea of parked cars. "The park would be cut off from town."

"At the time, I was the chairman of Springdale's planning commission," says Louise Excell of this period in the 1990s. "The economy of our little gateway town completely depends on visitors to the national park. We had to ask: Do we want them to drive through, or do we want them in Springdale? It made good economic sense to have them park in Springdale, to leave their cars in town."

"It was easy to convince the park," Excell says. "They loved the idea for Springdale to take up the parking."

"It was a huge moment when the park and the community started looking for a common solution," says J. Patrick Shea Jr., a landscape architect who is a transportation project manager at the National Park Service's Denver Service Center. While the idea came from the town, it was a perfect reflection of a development philosophy that the National Park Service had developed in the 1970s and 1980s, Shea says.

It's ongoing

Building and improvements in the national parks seem to come in waves. The first wave occurred when the first parks were founded at the beginning of the 20th century. The National Park Service had to provide everything to visitors, from lodging to transportation to food, in what were, for the most part, remote wilderness areas.

The middle of the Great Depression in the 1930s may seem like an odd time for a national park building boom, but federal programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, were designed to put people to work. During the 1920s, the architectural style of the park system, which blended influences from the arts and crafts movement and Adirondack architecture with the use of local wood and stone, became formalized. Known as National Park Service rustic, or "parkitecture," it became a hallmark of the CCC's projects of the 1930s.

In 1953, Bernard DeVoto's article about problems faced by national parks spurred many readers into action. The article is credited with inspiring the biggest increase in congressional funding in National Park Service history, which led to a program called Mission 66, after the park service's then upcoming 50th anniversary, and a building boom of its own.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Shea says, the park service needed to confront the possibility that too much development inside the parks could interfere with the reasons people were coming to the parks in the first place, whether it was a cultural experience at a historic site or to experience nature. The NPS began looking outside the parks to provide visitors with lodging, food, and other accommodations.

Shea says the park service stopped building overnight accommodations at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, and instead turned to the park's gateway communities to provide some lodging for visitors.

"Maybe we can't build our way out of our problems," Shea says of the philosophy. "We need to use alternatives."

Hug, don't squeeze

Today those alternatives are seen throughout the National Park Service: in the relationship with concessioners that provide food and transportation services, corporate sponsorships through the National Park Foundation, and partnerships with nonprofit organizations that provide volunteers and funding for projects like building hiking trails or restoring historic buildings.

One example is the plan for the National Mall, which is run by the National Park Service. "Everybody had to have a site on the mall," says Alan Harwood, a principal at the Alexandria, Virginia, office of AECOM, a frequent planning contractor to the National Park Service. One museum after another tried to lay claim to a patch of the mall.

"We helped do a study that identified 100 key locations in the city," often at major intersections or other high-traffic locations, says Harwood. Identifying these locations led to the National Capital Planning Commission's 2006 Memorials and Museums Master Plan, which creates a memorial zone within Washington.

The Monumental Core Framework Plan is a related planning tool that aims to protect the National Mall from overuse, while bringing the benefits of museums and memorials to other parts of the district. "The Museums and Memorials Plan pushes them off the Mall," says Harwood, "while the Monumental Core pulls them into certain areas."

It works both ways

The Zion National Park shuttle service is another example of identifying alternatives rather than just building more. When shuttle service began in 2000, it was among the first in the National Park System, says Milestone. The shuttle makes 10 stops along Springdale's main street, which is also the access road to the park. Most of the stops are at inns and hotels. In the first year of service, the town section of the shuttle carried 175,000 riders, says Zion National Park landscape architect and project manager Jim Butterfus.

The shuttle, says Excell, "has changed the nature of the town a little bit. Restaurants that used to do a big lunch business have seen lunch drop off. Visitors patronize the restaurants for breakfast instead, or buy a lunch to bring into the park. Once visitors take the shuttle into the park, they want to stay."

Shea says that the shuttle has shifted the way people visit the park. "Instead of a day trip driving through the canyon, the park is now a destination." More than just relieving a parking crunch, the shuttle has allowed visitors to enjoy the park more deeply and, because they stay longer, has increased the town's tax revenue as well.

Shuttle riders walk from the last town shuttle stop into the pedestrian entrance to the park, a few steps away. They pay a $25 fee to enter the park, and can then board the park leg of the shuttle at the visitor's center. The park shuttle is a tandem, natural gas vehicle, basically a long, hinged bus, that makes nine stops in the park.

There are two roads through the main section of the park. It is possible to drive a private vehicle on the main road, Route 9, between the south, or Springdale, entrance and the east entrance all year round. Most of the park's attractions, however, are on a spur that forks north from the main road. That road, Zion Canyon Scenic Drive, is closed to private vehicles from April to October. Access can be controlled because the spur road dead-ends deep in the canyon. In its first year of operation, the park leg of the shuttle carried 1.4 million riders.

All parts of the park are open to private vehicles during the off-peak seasons. But during peak season, even though there are many more visitors, the park is transformed. "It gets really quiet here once we close the road in April," says Milestone.

As it turns out, the number of parking spots inside Zion National Park really limited the number of visitors. With more parking in Springdale, the park now sees three million visitors a year. The shuttle system set the park single-day record one busy Saturday, says Milestone, providing 37,000 rides to 17,000 people.

"The mandatory shuttle system at Zion is a great example of a solution for addressing too many cars in the main canyon," says Cory MacNulty, program manager for the NPCA's Southwest region. "It's a great model because the park worked closely with the town of Springdale."

Managing visitor use

The National Park Service has many multimodal transportation success stories. The shuttle system in Grand Canyon National Park was an early triumph, says Barbara Johnson, chief of planning at the National Park Service's Denver Service Center. Today the shuttle system is extensive, with several routes, bicycle racks on the shuttles, links to gateway communities, and even a south rim to north rim shuttle that makes the 4.5-hour trip during peak visitor months.

A transit system at Acadia National Park in Maine was created in 1999 to link the park with its gateway communities. Local organizations donated staff time to create a plan, and back then, federal funds were available to reduce congestion, promote air quality, and create shuttle systems for national parks. Aggressive fundraising by local partners allowed the park to meet the federal government's local matching requirement.

The Acadia's Island Explorer shuttle system was so successful, Shea says, that it serves the whole region, including communities on the mainland, which gives the park access to more seasonal employees. NCPA transportation vice president Laura Loomis notes, though, that the federal programs that allowed Acadia National Park to start the network are no longer available.

Utah's Bryce Canyon National Park recently created a shuttle system similar to Zion's, in that it starts from an inn in the nearest gateway community, but the Bryce Canyon shuttle is voluntary, says NCPA's MacNulty. Arches National Park, also in Utah, spent years developing a plan for a shuttle to relieve parking congestion and reduce air pollution, but is still looking for a way to pay for it.

Zion itself is proceeding slowly with changes to its road system. You can just imagine the problems caused when a recreational vehicle approaches the closed Zion Canyon Scenic Drive in peak season. The narrow road does not easily accommodate a large vehicle turning around.

Turnarounds for larger vehicles at key locations, including the entrance fee station, are among the changes planned. Another is rerouting the road so it more intuitively leads to the visitor's center. "The old road system led to the old visitor's center," says Butterfus. "When visitors come into the park, they immediately have to turn right. I've timed it, and you have about four seconds to decide. Many people blow by it and then they are lost."

Because the main road through the park is a highway, visitors can drive in one end of the park and out the other, without realizing they missed the visitor's center, the museum, and the natural wonders along Zion Canyon Scenic Drive. The new road and signage will better guide visitors to their destination, Butterfus says.

Last year there were 500,000 riders on the town leg of the shuttle, and the park leg served 3.1 million riders, Butterfus reports. The shuttle and park visitors have placed new strains on the park and on the town of Springdale. The word of the hour in both places seems to be capacity.

"By eliminating the limiting factor of parking spaces at the trailheads, there are even more people on the trails that arrive in groups as the shuttles drop off," says NCPA's MacNulty. "Now, their trail system is at maximum capacity at the height of season, with pulses of people hitting trailheads at the same time." That influences the people, equipment, and resources needed to maintain those trails, she says.

In Springdale, the issue is parking capacity. "The idea that existing parking areas at local businesses and street parking could accommodate the needed parking worked really well for the first few years," says Tom Dansie. "But as visitors and shuttle riders have increased, the parking has maxed out."

Inevitably, parking has changed the nature of the town. "Cars parked all up and down the street give the town an urban feel, instead of the small-town feel that we strive for," he says.

Building bigger parking lots wouldn't help. "We don't want football-field sized parking lots in Springdale," says Excell. Building new lots inside the park is yet another solution, but visitors who park inside Zion are less likely to patronize the town's hotels, restaurants, and shops. "It's a difficult balancing act," says Dansie.

In November 2013, more than 100 people from national park gateway communities in Utah, including Springdale, gathered to discuss common issues. "A shuttle system must be the least of the bad options," says Excell, "since so many other places want to do the same." What's different in Springdale, Excell realized, is the cooperative relationship between the park and the town.

It may be that the most successful thing Zion National Park built was not a shuttle system, but a relationship with a community that shares in its fortunes. Until it is less loved by visitors and more loved by congressional funders, the National Park Service can use every friend it can get.

Madeline Bodin writes frequently about the environment, conservation, and how people interact with the natural world.

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Resources

Images: Top — Visitors enjoy the view from Observation Point Trail, a strenuous eight-mile round-trip hike in Zion that climbs 2,000 feet above the canyon floor. photo by Christopher Gezon/NPS. Middle — Zion National Park is the lifeblood of Springdale, Utah, which partners with the National Park System to address issues that affect both the city and the park. Photo courtesy Madeline Bodin. Bottom — The shuttle that runs through Springdale, Utah, and into Zion has changed the nature of both the town and the park. Photo courtesy NPS.

National Park Service Transportation Planning Guide Book: www.nps.gov/transportation/nps_transportation_planning_guidebook.html

National Park Service design standards: www.nps.gov/dsc/workflows/dstandards.htm

"Addressing the National Park System's Maintenance Backlog through Historic Leasing," Preservation Leadership Forum, October 24, 2013: http://blog.preservationleadershipforum.org/2013/10/24/nps-historic-leasing/#.Us7rmrCA32Q

National Park Conservation Association "Parks Need Help" budget infographic: www.npca.org/assets/pdf/NationalParks_Print.pdf