National park visits are surging, and one firm is making unexpected millions | Hacker News Reader

National park visits are surging, and one firm is making unexpected millions

wsj.com

17 pointsarbuge16 comments

I'm fine with the contractors making money for a time frame with renewable contracts periodically by other companies.

But the code my tax dollars paid for should be open source and the contract should be biddable periodically.

An endless monopoly is not right in my opinion.

I don't understand what the problem is here. Recreation.gov is one of the few government websites that actually does what you'd expect in a relatively streamlined way. Agency managed websites are typically a hot mess... I'm looking at you USFS website.

Totally agree. I feel like some of these articles are written by children these days. Do you not understand that someone had to pay for the website to be built?

And having transaction fees is a good way to try different models. Good ideas with aligned incentives should be celebrated.

Don’t forget, the alternative would’ve still been the traditional “pay some defense contractor millions to do a shitty job and then pay them millions more to improve it”

Also, the headline is sensationalist. The total cost per ticket the buyer pays is $2 per vehicle. I've been to state parks that charge more. Yeah, it adds up to millions for the seller, but they're not charging extortionate prices.

Now that we know this type of contract model works, and if people are bothered by the unexpected windfall, future contracts can be structured differently to taper off or something.

I will say that I take issue with the fact that several of the more popular trails/areas where permits are issued by lottery. Recreation.gov charges a $10 lottery fee, which you pay even if you don’t get a permit, on top of the fee for the actual permit.

They're raking in the cash on these lotteries for places like The Wave. This is 100% my problem with it as well.

https://www.recreation.gov/permits/4251909

Application Fee: A non-refundable $9.00 lottery fee is required for each lottery application.

I went to the lottery a few times in Kanab and never got a permit. I've resigned myself to the fact that I'll probably never get one now.

How else would you suggest they do it? Demand has out placed the supply, it's either they charge a shitload, putting it out of reach for all but the elites, or put it behind a lottery.

the lottery itself is reasonable but $9 to participate in a digital drawing only feels ok if i think that around 90% of that is going to the national park. - It seems like what this article is saying is that you're paying $9 (edit: $5) to the contractor who runs the website, has a monopoly on the lottery system, and gets to set the lottery price. hence the ticketmaster comparison.

I'm pretty sympathetic to the argument that these drawings should be extremely inexpensive ($1?) and there should be some transparancy where the fee goes.

Also not mentioned in the article - I'm most familiar with how Yosemite and the parks in the sierras do it, but in those parks for popular trails there's a 6-month-in-advance lottery system, but there's also something like 10% of the quota reserved for 1-day-in-advance walk-up tickets only. So you either have to win a lottery that favors the preppy planners, OR be willing to wake up in the middle of the night and stand outside a park office for a few hours until they open. Not perfect, but it gives some options.

Another instance of the US federal government allowing its close friends to engage in unwarranted rentseeking.