Margaret Walls (emphasis added):
The parks have been blessed, and cursed, with an overwhelming number of visitors in recent years—a record 307 million in 2015. After many years in which visitation stayed relatively constant, many parks have seen increases of 20 to 25 percent over the past 10 years. ...
This growth in popularity has led to overcrowding, especially during the peak summer season. ...
The Park Service is making some gentle suggestions to travelers to alleviate the problems. It is encouraging people to come to the parks during winter months or eschew the most popular parks and visit some of the lesser-known ones instead. It is also considering more Draconian long-term measures, such as daily limits on the number of visitors and establishing a reservation system for entry.
But there is a more efficient approach that the Park Service should be seriously considering: changes in the pricing structure. ...
I’ve made the case before that caution should be exercised when employing user fees to finance public goods such as parks. But that’s because user fees ration use. When one person’s visit to a park doesn’t appreciably diminish the experience for others, the fee to use the park should be zero. That doesn’t apply when the public good starts to experience congestion problems, and that’s what’s happening in some of our national parks. Rather than just suggesting that people visit during the winter and go to alternative, less-popular sites, the Park Service should incentivize such behavior through a differentiated fee structure based on season and location. ...
Equity and accessibility are important issues, but an entrance fee is a tiny fraction of the overall cost of visiting a national park, most of which are located far from centers of population. For example, a family of four traveling from Chicago to the Grand Canyon is likely to incur costs of between $1,500 (driving) and $3,000 or more (flying) for a week’s vacation. The $30 entrance fee is a drop in the travel expense bucket. What’s more, the experience itself is diminished if it is spent jostling with crowds on trails and in restaurants and parking lots or if the overcrowding leads to degradation of the resource, which has happened in some parks.
Overcrowding is not the only problem the parks are facing that could be helped out by a shift in the fee structure. The parks are in dire need of a cash infusion. The Park Service’s deferred maintenance backlog sits at $12 billion and includes serious problems with critical water and sewer systems, roads and bridges, and visitor centers, lodges, and other buildings. ...
Figuring out an efficient and fair fee structure will not be easy. It requires detailed data on visitation, for starters, and analysis to shed light on price elasticities of demand for different groups of visitors at different locations. It may also require some experimentation. But to preserve our national parks for the next 100 years, it is necessary.
via www.rff.org
My guess is that there would be much less resistance to an increase in user fees at National Parks if the fee structure is differentiated. Increase fees when demand is high and reduce them when demand is low.
