Hacker News Reader

Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

As much as this type of corruption sucks... I gotta say recreation.gov is way better than what came before it, with every state and federal system doing their own random thing with terrible UX and horrible performance, and many campsites having no online presence at all.

Many places now on recreation.gov used to require you to fax in reservations and wait days for a confirmation, or else just do the drive up and fill out a paper slip thing the morning of (too bad if they're all gone).

Sure, it'd be nice to clean up the fees and get more money to the parks themselves, but I gotta give credit to the website for cleaning up what used to be a nightmare and turning it into a pretty streamlined (if slightly more expensive) process.

Edit: Imagine if we had a similar system for the departments of motor vehicles... pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes online instead of hours at the local office. Who wouldn't pay for that if they could afford it?

Of course it would be better to have actually functional public services, but our governments just don't seem to be set up to actually be effective at basic services. Is it worse for public dollars to get funneled to a public private partnership with an overhead, that at least delivers a functional product, or to just disappear forever into the coffers of bureaucrats and their cronies with nothing to show for it?

View on HN

at what cost? and what is the governance model? The suit is more about the lack of governance with the free structure and not abiding by the law about establishing fees .

Here's one example from the article

Last year there were 22,435 lottery applicants for a permit to run the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. Only 330 individuals received a permit. Yet, all applicants paid the $6 lottery fee -- even unsuccessful lottery applicants. Under Booz Allen’s arrangement with the federal government, it could pocket all lottery fees, which amounted to $134,610 just for the Middle Fork lottery

That's interesting and extremely agitating. I had always thought the majority of the lottery fees were going back to the park for use and maintenance of the resource.

I get it, there is an underlying profit motive that needs to be satisfied by the hosting company (Booz). And recreation.gov is sure tons better than anything that came before (especially for rafting trip lotteries). But yeah, there's a lot of money there that really should mostly being going back to the management entity.

I would like to understand why this is a problem? Objectively, they ran the lottery, distributed the permits, and charged a fee to do so. What is your objection specifically?

I don't intend to passively inject an opinion — just trying to understand your position.

The item of value being offered by the lottery is taxpayer funded, whereas most lotteries fund prizes via the proceeds of the lottery tickets.

In this way, it can be considered exploitative since the proceeds don’t go back into “the pot” to any degree.

The value being provided here is the website, which received no taxpayer funding other than the lottery proceeds.

Ah, I stand corrected, looking at Booz’s website I see that the agreement from the start was no upfront cost to taxpayers.

Therein lies the rub: the people we selected to represent us turned us into a cash flow which they then sold to a government contractor. Instead of buying us a website, they sold us.

But an endless cost on the backend...

Sounds like a great deal. At least for one political party who's entire theory of government is starving the beast. Labeling a fee based rental agreement as not being a tax is more important than what the actual final use cost actually is. Even if the users actually paying the fee end up spending orders of magnitude more in the long run. Its a fantastic way to hide immense sums of corruption, it just needs to be done one dollar at a time.

The state and federal governments trains hundreds of thousands of computer science engineers a year. Engineering students are also in dire need of internships to appear employable. Seems like another way to run a website at little cost to taxpayers would be an internship program using a portion of the massive engineering workforce government is already paying to train, although that would mean a consultants hands are removed from the honeyjar.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if booze allens own college summer interns are doing the bulk of the work on this website.

The _POINT_ of computers and websites is to lower the individual transactional costs of things like applying for a lottery. Rather than having to pick up the phone and speak to a person, or drive to the local office and fill out paperwork.

Yet somehow, the person in the toll booth option has regularly been the cheaper option than paying these immense fee's to obviously corrupt government contractors.

How many web site designers and colocated machines does it take to run a freaking reservation system that probably gets a couple million reservations a day.

Plus, if done correctly a large initial investment and then a trivial amount of work to keep it running, where the vast majority of the work is the local parks/etc changing the state of campground availability/etc.

Put another way, everyone wants to be the credit card companies that have successfully gotten massively rich on a system where they are taking a percentage of the total transactional value rather than a trivial flat per transaction fee. And this model doesn't belong anywhere near public systems because those public lands exist for the "public", the majority of which can barely afford the gas to get to the park, much less funneling more of their meager resources to a fat cat government contractor.

$6 is close to an hours work for someone making minimum wage.

> How many web site designers and colocated machines does it take to run a freaking reservation system that probably gets a couple million reservations a day.

The cool thing about the US is that it's a democracy. If you feel so strongly about this, make this case to the government. There's precedent and it's bad, it's called healthcare.gov. I don't mean this in a pithy way btw, I'm a transit activist and I go to protests, phone up lawmakers, and attend public meetings. There are a wide array of small reasons that all sum up to the government being really bad at certain things. But again, this can change with you and me. Don't be emotional on HN, be emotional to your state reps!

> The _POINT_ of computers and websites is to lower the individual transactional costs of things like applying for a lottery. Rather than having to pick up the phone and speak to a person, or drive to the local office and fill out paperwork.

You're forgetting the huge growth our National Parks have seen. The days of the toll booth worked when the US had a fraction of its people, a fraction of the motor vehicle traffic, before the virality of social media, and with a more ingrained belief that a national park was a rugged place and not a place to take the family in an air conditioned, controlled experience. The old system of phone calls would have just made the parks out of reach for all of these new folks interested in them.

>You're forgetting the huge growth our National Parks have seen

Except this isn't true. 2022 saw 311.9 million visitors, up from 2000 which saw 285.8 million. That's not "huge" growth, that's not even keeping up with population growth (2020: 329 million vs 2000: 282 million). https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/visitation-numbers.htm

Those extra millions aren't evenly distributed across the parks system, though. Some parks are seeing way more growth than others. Breakdown here (annual view, aggregate by park, filter by National Park designation): https://www.nps.gov/subjects/socialscience/visitor-use-stati...

For example, Smoky Mountains NP went from 8M in 1980 to 10M in 2000 to 14M in 2022.

Zion went from 1M in 1980 to 2.4M in 2000 to 4.7 M in 2022.

Yosemite went from 2.5M to 5M+, much of that concentrated in the Valley.

For the impacted parks, it is very difficult to keep up with that sort of growth. It's not like those parks grow bigger to keep up with visitation, or hire staff at the same rate, or are able to build more parking lots.

Edit: And also, for Wilderness-designated areas -- whose purpose is to provide a "wilderness feel" for current and future generations, as distinct from the "crowded Yosemite lodge feel" -- it's an even tougher ask. There are only so many trails you can build through a glacier or a meadow or a ridgetop before you erode the wilderness feel completely, and it's hard to spread groups out enough on those few trails so that they're not swarming past each other.

I thought Smoky Mountain has no entrance fee, so how are they counting individuals accurately?

Yosemite is popular and began to use mandatory busses. That seems reasonable, though unrelated to the topic of junk website fees.

I didn't know that, and that's a great question! Apparently they count cars and multiply it by some # of passengers per car. The methodology was recently updated:https://smokymountainnews.com/archives/item/33883-counting-c...

Buses are one step, but not always enough. Zion for example has mandatory bussing but they still need to do permits for Angel's Landing (if I remember right) and lotteries for the Narrows, especially for the few backpacking campsites in there.

> The old system of phone calls would have just made the parks out of reach for all of these new folks interested in them.

Deep down, that’s what a lot of the critics want a return to. They just won’t say the quiet part out loud.

It's not even some deep, dark secret... who wouldn't treasure their own little slice of paradise, known only to them and those dearest to them? Who wouldn't want to be able to experience a special natural place as though they were the only ones there? Who can blame people for wanting to keep these special places, special?

It's part of the everyday jobs of these agencies to try to maintain that illusion for its visitors, where possible. And part of why it's so hard to do juggle these needs. We could of course tear down more forest and build more parking lots around our parks, then add more paved trails and tramways and escalators to different parts of the park, turning them into amusement parks... but that would defeat the point. It's not easy to balance visitor accessibility with resource protection, especially when so many visitors barely ever step outside of their vehicles to go on the trails, instead tending to horde the most scenic viewpoints at a quick stop.

The NPS was established primarily as an automotive touring network, and were designed as such. Only recently have we started to try to encourage motorists to exit vehicles and actually fan out across the park, but it's not easy. And even that effort eventually backfires, as more and more people DO hit the trails and in turn crowd them, too. At some point lotteries are inevitable. Even designating new parks isn't really a fix, especially since people will horde new parks all at once in its first few years (see Indiana Dunes, which used to be a laid-back state park and then became a major destination because of its new National Park designation).

Don't get me wrong: I think it's awesome that more people are able to participate in our public lands (and in turn develop an appreciation for nature, wilderness, maybe even the climate and conservation, etc.). But it absolutely HAS to be deliberately managed, or our lands will be "loved to death"...

100%. The NPS is fundamentally a balance between the desires of the taxpayers funding to conserve this land who also want to visit it and the inherent need to keep this land as untouched as possible to keep their rugged, wilderness feel and to preserve the ecological diversity in the area. All the while not leaving park visitors to die due to bear attacks or a fall causing a broken bone. It's a very difficult job. Restricting access and offering lotteries is also in my view inevitable.

> The cool thing about the US is that it's a democracy. If you feel so strongly about this, make this case to the government.

First of all, the question is not whether you’re able to complain about problems. The question is whether popular demand can actually affect change. All sorts of political systems allow you to complain. In fact, there is an argument that a one party system needs to be more responsive to popular demands, since there is no alternative but revolution. In a two party system, one party might listen to your National Park website complaints (and do nothing) and the other party wants to pave over and privatize the Grand Canyon. Hell of a choice, huh?

Further, even if your complaints are heard, it’s an extremely idealized version of how politics works in the US. The reality is there are innumerable examples of monied interests being preferred to popular consensus. And in this case there is a very specific monied interest involved in the corruption. Their only mistake is that they (hopefully) broke the law in the process.

The objection is that this is a government monopoly funnelling money to a private company beyond what GP (and myself) consider to be a reasonable profit margin.

What has BAH's total profits been on this project? What did they spend to make it, what have their operating costs amounted to, how much have they made?

As someone who participates in these lotteries, the lack of transparency is the biggest issue. If there's a way to view estimated odds I have not seen it.

Additionally, these lotteries usually have a second level of rules that impact your odds. For example, day of week or starting trailhead. I would gladly shift dates / routes and apply for different lotteries, but I have little basis to make those decisions on.

If there are only 330 permits don't the odds depend entirely on how many people sign up?

Perhaps the above comment means that the secondary factors affect the denominator - i.e more people go hiking on Saturday, so entering the Saturday lottery is worse than entering the Wednesday one

Exactly, and it impacts the denominator by a great margin.

The value of the lottery ticket to me is a function of the cost, odds, timing and interest I have in the destination.

If the odds of one trailhead are 1000x lower than another one that is comparable across the other variables then I'm needlessly overpaying, and Booze Allen pockets that inefficiency.

Sure, but they could display odds from past lotteries or provide current odds at time of purchase. You really have no clue what you're getting when you give them your $6-$15.

It doesn't abide by the law (the plaintiffs case).

It's not free enterprise: the govt is granting them a monopoly on ticket sales for those events.

It's economically inefficient. The operators are making insane profit margins (likely 75%+ ) with no competition.

These are public resources funded by tax payers. The operator is making illegal and unreasonable profit on the taxpayers property

I would happily code and run a lottery system for $0.99 per entry. Someone else would likely do it for cheaper than that.

It just seems egregiously expensive.

If you have the means, how about starting a better-run company or cooperative or nonprofit to compete against the likes of Booz? I'd love to join and/or support such an effort.

I’ll see what I can figure out. Feel free to email me (address in my profile).

Honestly a wave of non-profit software companies would be a fantastic boon for the world. However my current work arrangement is tough to top so for fairly selfish reasons I probably wouldn't consider it for a few more years.

For clarity, I'm totally for this suit, and hope that the public can claw back those dollars.

But in the grand scheme of things, that seems like such a minor technicality. $6 to $15 here or there, a couple times a year on vacation, is way better than the alternative systems that were common before recreation.gov, with faxed lotteries, long delays, and high uncertainty. It used to be common that you'd just have to drive to the place, wait an hour or two in line, pay the admission fee (if you don't have a annual pass), then sign up for some lottery on the spot at like 7am and wait a few hours to hear back. If you don't get it, well, there goes your plans... but you're already there.

By contrast, a small fee here and there for the ahead-of-time guarantee of a reservation is totally worth it. $130,000 to run a lottery system effectively? That's not a whole lot. Even if it costs a few million, nationally, to run them... that's nothing. I can pretty much guarantee you the NPS, USFS, and BLM together wouldn't be able to run a smooth national reservation & lottery system with the same budget and fees. The agencies themselves are so far removed -- in both mission and skill set -- from modern app UX that they probably wouldn't be able to get the job done even with 10x the budget.

I don't doubt that the contractor (Booz Allen Hamilton) is a scumbag for pocketing those fees, which are unnecessary to begin with (it's not like it costs $15 in CPU or human processing time to do a change). It'd be great if the public gets those back.

All I'm saying is that recreation.gov is totally and absolutely worth it despite these fees, despite the increased costs to the public, because it actually works, vs the chaos that came before it. That website makes public lands FAR more discoverable, accessible, and reliable -- at the cost of minor corruption. I think that is an ultimately acceptable tradeoff, even if it's not ideal. (And it's not like I'm some libertarian; I love our parks and public lands, but digital anything just really isn't their strong suit. I'm grateful they outsourced it.)

Maybe what we need, in lieu of effective federal digital agencies, is some sort of public-FOSS partnership that can take the place of public-private partnerships. But that's much harder for the agencies to deal with than a central commercial entity with designated contacts, support, etc. And the FOSS model isn't really set up to communicate in the real world with the super complicated division of public lands across federal/state/local/agency divides, each with their own little fiefdoms and idiosyncrasies and rules and regulations.

I wonder how other countries manage similar use cases (digital presence for public lands)? Recently went hiking in Taiwan and reserved a trail permit; the UX was terrible even by 90s standards -- at least it was online -- but at least it worked. Not sure how they funded it, but I don't remember there being any fees.

I wonder why it is necessary to have all these limits and reservation slots in the first place?

In Austria, when you want to go on a hike, you just go. Sure, there are some popular routes that are crowded, but 99% of our national parks are completely empty. As soon as you can't drive somewhere and it takes a few hours to hike there, it's pretty empty anyway.

Are there so many more hikers in the US, or is this about limiting access to the most popular routes?

99% of national park and forest activities do not require a reservation. It's only for the most popular hikes and river rafting, with some exceptions.

Some parks are particularly popular, and a reservation system is needed to minimize impact on trails / the environment.

Most of the lotteries/reservations are for cabins, campgrounds, and rafting popular rivers. For day hiking, very few places require a permit.

There's often a daily park admission fee you pay at the gate. Per person or per car, it varies. Sometimes included with a camping reservation, sometimes not.

This fee goes to the park itself. Booz allen only gets paid for the lottery system.

They are also getting paid for every campsite reservation and many "free" permits that are first come first served. One example, the parking lot for Multnomah Falls in the Columbia River Gorge requires a permit that allows you to enter a rest area off the interstate during a specific one hour period that also serves as the parking for the falls. You may then stay as long as you like. The permits are free but I you pay a $2 fee per car to recreation.gov for the privilege.

Despite being a highway rest area it is illegal to stop there from Memorial Day to Labor Day without a pre-purchased permit. I generally avoid the area during high season so I have no idea how strictly this is enforced should you ever have an urgent need for a toilet.

> For day hiking, very few places require a permit.

These days though, even day hiking is increasingly permitted :( I live near the Oregon Cascades, an area that used to be unpermitted but got too popular. A few years ago they introduced a permit system (for both day hikes and overnights), but implemented it terribly... a large % of the permits were released on a single day and were sold out within hours.

People ended up hoarding multiple permits for multiple weekends because they couldn't be sure which weekend they could go (or what the weather would be like), then 40% of the permit holders never showed up on their given reservations... so nobody got to go. They've since tweaked the system.

https://www.opb.org/article/2022/02/16/wilderness-permit-cen...

Your point absolutely stands -- that day hike permits are still largely unusual across the entirety of the US public lands systems -- but more and more places are getting so popular that they do require reservations. It's one of the downsides of social systems like TikTok or Alltrails, which improve discoverability but also focus public attention on the few best trails rather than the thousands of "still pretty good" trails.

Yes, it's the "most popular" routes/campsites/activities that are the most impacted, but "most popular" is a moving target. A lot of our public lands become victims of their own successes, especially in the age of Instagram and TikTok.

Decades past, nobody but the most adventurous would visit these places and reservations were never an issue. Then, with increased visibility/awareness (starting from things like the American Automobile Association magazines, to TripAdvisor, to these days TikTok and Alltrails) visitation kept going up and up and up and up and the lands and agencies couldn't keep up.

This is especially the case with our major parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion) but even smaller places can become an issue with enough social media exposure:

Horseshoe Bend in Arizona: https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/instagram-tourism-booms-hor...

Or Muir Woods just outside of San Francisco: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Wildly-popular-Muir-W...

So places have to try different strategies, including but not limited to lotteries, park-and-ride shuttles, timed reservations, rotating closures, etc. to both enable access but also protect the very resources that people are flocking to see.

It's not just a top-down effort either. There are grassroots NGOs dedicated to trying to balance visitation vs preservation, like Leave No Trace (https://lnt.org/) and the Access Fund (https://www.accessfund.org/).

It's a hard problem all around... you want people to be able to easily enjoy the lands that their tax dollars pay for, but when there are TOO many people (and tourists, both domestic and international)... it gets crazy.

It's just for the popular national parks and it's only about the popular seasons, and a lot of it has to do with motor vehicle traffic. My partner and I ride our bikes to most parks or we visit parks off-peak and we almost never bother with any of this.

EDIT: I've always wondered why more private companies don't create shared buses to help backpackers hit the entrance to the park. A lot of the times just getting to the entrance is what makes folks use their cars, and if you could park in a nearby town and take a shuttle in and start your backpacking that would go a long way. I know some parks run shuttles inside the park but I'm talking about a more backpacker/cyclist specific transport just to the entrance to minimize impact on the park itself.

Do you ever check before you just show up? There's not enough rangers to go around checking permits on every trail, but if you're unlucky and get caught without a permit when you're supposed to have one, you might have to pay a fine (not the end of the world) but also might get turned around (ruining your vacation plans). And if the same ranger catches you twice on the same trail after turning you around... lol... they tend not to be too happy.

We don't, but we also check the hike-bike site locations beforehand, grab all the necessary backcountry permits, and also try to hoof it in early to maximize chances of getting a site. Of course since we're on bike we plan a lot more than most visitors in a car (since we plan out water stops, food, clothing changes, etc etc.) We've definitely encountered the occasional ranger but they're usually much friendlier to bikers than drivers in my experience.

That's good to know! Can't wait to try to my first bikepacking trip :)

Absolutely! I can't recommend backpacking through the parks enough. A petty part of me can get quite smug biking or backpacking past a traffic jam near the entrance haha. Also, the views you get on foot are absolutely marvelous and there's a sense of "earning" your mileage that I find unparalleled. You'll need to be more careful with planning of course (also don't forget things like bear-proofing food and accounting for wind if you're on a bike), and even the best laid plans will fail and you'll end up camping some place you didn't intend on, but it's all part of the journey!

I've done a lot of backpacking (from a car or shuttle), but never bikepacking or biking-to-backpack. Is the latter possible, like is there a good way to fit a backpacking pack, bear can, etc. inside panniers or otherwise tethered to a bike?

Absolutely. You can look online to see all sorts of cool loadouts that folks have, but the easiest way to do it is to just get a bunch of bungie cords and large panniers and stuff things inside. The trick is to distribute the weight evenly among your panniers so that you don't unbalance the bike. A huge loadout can have up to 4 large panniers (2 in back, 2 in front) along with stuff hitched to a rear rack up top. My partner and I tend to do 2 panniers each, where we each take our stuff and I take some of the heavier/larger common stuff (bear cans, tent.) There's a whole world of bikepacking and bike/backpack loadouts out there.

Great advice. Thank you!

> I've always wondered why more private companies don't create shared buses to help backpackers hofit the entrance to the park.

Don't they, though? I've seen these at Zion, the Lost Coast, the Cascades, Olympic National Park, etc. And around big cities, often the city/county itself will provide a direct-to-trailhead bus.

I'm only familiar with the Zion shuttle. I probably need to do more research here thanks!

Yosemite has YARTS: https://yarts.com/

> My partner and I ride our bikes to most parks or we visit parks off-peak and we almost never bother with any of this.

No doubt this is sometimes true, but all the permits & reservations I'm aware of in parks are for the hikes themselves, it doesn't matter how you arrived there.

> I wonder why it is necessary to have all these limits and reservation slots in the first place?

For one thing it generates a lot of profits for both recreation.gov and (somewhat less) the parks. That's unavoidably going to be a motivation for ever more limits and lotteries.

For me that's really soured the idea of going to these places. In the 90s I'd go to any park, show up and hike wherever without any limits, it was great. Now it's hard to be able to ever go, let alone luck into the limited slots.

Too many public lands in the US are managed like amusement parks instead of nature parks. These places would be less crowded and there would be less need for lotteries and permits if visitors had to make more of an effort to get there and use them. You don't even need to pack a picnic when you can count on a cafe and restaurant in the park. Once you are there and tying up a precious parking spot, you don't have to hike to see the scenery -- you can go into the air conditioned theatre and watch the park movie! Have an ice cream! Don't want to listen to the birds? You can listen to a live band at the lodge instead. Instead of allowing contractors and concessionaires to exploit these unique public treasures, the parks could focus on preservation instead.

I'm not sure how it works in other countries -- and I hope I'm not explaining something you already know -- but the US has a LOT of different types of public land designations (https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45340.pdf PDF page 9) and agencies to manage them (https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF10585.pdf)

Some, like the most prominent parts of National Parks, are specifically managed to enable easy access (and also ADA accessibility, like wheelchair-friendly paths). There are also preservation-focused areas, especially but not only Wilderness (our highest form of protection, designated by Congress, prohibits motorized traffic and most buildings, often no use of machines like chainsaws or ATVs, though most will allow pack mules and such). Many multi-use areas (National Forests, BLM land, etc.) also have minimal facilities, often just a dirt lot and maybe a pit toilet if you're lucky. On the other hand, some smaller National Monuments might have no accessible areas EXCEPT for a visitor center and parking lot, usually to protect some extremely limited or fragile resource.

The USA is HUGE and many lands are public and/or protected for various reasons, to different goals. Not every trail is a National Park, and not every National Park is there for hiking or backpacking.

And it's also not merely a matter of land designation. Crowding can happen even in designated wilderness areas, often the result of a place going viral or being in close proximity to a major city or whatever.

> All I'm saying is that recreation.gov is totally and absolutely worth it despite these fees, despite the increased costs to the public, because it actually works, vs the chaos that came before it.

> at the cost of minor corruption.

I would hope the government does not adopt "Value Based Pricing," given that we already pay them plenty in taxes. And when we discover corruption, we should kill it.

Counterpoint: for ten years prior to 2020 I rented a forest service cabin in a national forest on a holiday weekend every year and never once had any issue navigating the pre-Booz system. I agree it was not a very fancy site but it worked. I do not disagree with you that it is more accessible now, and I agree that the more people who get to access the parks, the better.

Was that with ReserveAmerica, by chance? That was another public-private partnership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReserveAmerica that a lot of campsites used before Recreation.gov

But it's true, it used to be a lot easier to find space! I'm especially sad that a long-time dream of mine (staying at firewatch tower) seems completely out of reach now. Selfishly, I do yearn for the times when the outdoors were a more exclusive club. But the American (and communitarian) in me recognizes these as public lands, to be shared by all, even if wider access personally inconveniences me. I feel lucky that I got to experience some of these places at all before they blew up... as a millennial, I guess I'm part of that last generation that still knows what it was like pre-internet. Gens Z and beyond may never have that luxury of experiencing a public place that 10,000 TikTokers hadn't already been to... last week.

I highly recommend checking out the National Forest system if you haven't. Mendocino National Forest is an absolute gem. It's huge, rugged, and full of places to go. It's still quite fiddly to figure out what to do there and because it's not as popular as the NPs it's largely untouched.

Spent a lot of time in the NorCal regions (Klamath, Six Rivers, Shasta-Trinity), but only a little around Mendo. Any particular highlights?

Side note: And this is exactly how the best places get overcrowded, lol ;)

> Yet, all applicants paid the $6 lottery fee -- even unsuccessful lottery applicants.

You actually need the lottery fees not to be refunded, otherwise people will spam the system, knowing they will get their lottery fee returned to them if they are not successful.

> campsites having no online presence at all.

I don't think this was an improvement. It has led to fewer people being able to use the campsites, as they are easily and cheaply reserved. Thus, people who have plenty of money to spare reserve them on the off-chance of wanting to use it that day. But when that day comes, they don't show up.

Yep. Personally seen people book two weeks for the off chance they might go for one of those days.

Unless they're doing individual daily reservations, it doesn't work like that. You forfeit the entire reservation if you don't arrive on the start date, but you can always depart early.

You can edit your reservation, which means you can book two weeks, then change it so you only use the last three days of July 3,4,5 (for example). This means that by the time reservations open for July 3, all the spots are taken.

Sounds like the solution to that is just a large deposit that’s refundable upon arrival?

Doesn’t that still just favor people with more money? If you’re tight on money you won’t be able to afford the deposit. And if you’re really rich you still don’t care about the deposit.

Also in many places the camping fee itself is already steep.

Correct it doesn’t equalize the richest to the poorest, but it does equalize much more of the in-between, where surely the vast majority of this issue lives.

In general it seems with runaway wealth inequality we need an easy way to set fees and fines as a % of ability-to-pay (i.e. equalized pain-of-payment). We also need this for parking and traffic violations, for example.

> Of course it would be better to have actually functional public services, but our governments just don't seem to be set up to actually be effective at basic services.

It's amazing to me that people will just blow by this point while accepting corporate monopolization of what should be a public resource.

> or to just disappear forever into the coffers of bureaucrats and their cronies with nothing to show for it?

It's better that the people who do this are punished. Either with criminal charges or with the removal of their ability to bid for future government contracts.

The government is a sucker client. They pay huge contracts, always on time, and never follow up after they get screwed. And no, it's not better to just punt on this issue and throw even more money at a greedy rent seeking middleman.

What's the solution, though? You're criticizing "accepting corporate monopolization of what should be a public resource," which is fair, but you're also ignoring the actual problem that we have a public resource that can only handle an amount of utilization that is less than demand. We need a system to allocate demand.

The post you're responding to isn't saying these things are good, but it's taking the practical perspective that the current system is better than what existed before and probably better than what the government would produce itself.

It's easy to say that we shouldn't accept involving corporations in this way, and it's easy to say bureaucratic waste/theft should be punished. I think most people here would agree with you in a theoretical perspective.

The problem is that we have to deal with the constraints of the real world, which the parent post addresses and you ignore. I'd invite you not to ignore them and just criticize, and instead to propose a solution - what do you think is the right way to allocate usage of national parks and related service that does not involve private corporations and also avoids bureaucratic waste?

> It's amazing to me that people will just blow by this point while accepting corporate monopolization of what should be a public resource.

I think it's more a matter of picking your battles. What are the things that our government does poorly, which should be handled better? Let's see... education, healthcare, science and arts funding, housing, wars, surveillance, immigration, highways and bridges, Amtrak...

It's hard enough to improve (for example) local transit, petitioning a dozen people across 1-3 agencies for a few tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of improvements. But to try to get Congress to implement a system affecting thousands of sites across all 50 states, across the NPS, USFS, USFWS, BLM, Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps of Engineers, etc... where do you even start with such a thing? Of all the letter, protests, petitions, voicemails, public meetings, etc. I've experienced, I've never once received a meaningful reply (much less actual positive change) from any politician higher than city-level. Our governments are just not set up to be responsive to regular citizens. You have to have a shit ton of money or power to matter at all.

When even organized nonprofits with established lobbies struggle with this -- a lot -- what is the average citizen supposed to do? Our lack of meaningful representation is a major systemic flaw of our so-called democracy, not something some rando on HN can single-handedly solve (unless, maybe, you're one of the major tech CEOs on here... hey Vercel or Cloudflare, wanna help us make a better reservation system and forever earn public gratitude? lol)

> It's better that the people who do this are punished. Either with criminal charges or with the removal of their ability to bid for future government contracts.

Is it that black and white? Recreation.gov isn't the failure that (say) Healthcare.gov or WhiteHouse.com (the petition site) was. In fact it works very well. And from the news article, apparently the lottery fees were supposed to pay for most of the website in lieu of an upfront fee (though there's some question about a questionable $120 million fee).

In terms of government digital efforts, honestly, this is probably the best one I've ever seen. Can't remember the last time it broke or crashed, and I've made dozens of reservations through it smoothly. And the cost to me... maybe $20/year?

> The government is a sucker client. They pay huge contracts, always on time, and never follow up after they get screwed.

Agreed. Part of our election cycles and extreme partisanship politics =/ Day to day services get deprioritized vs hot-button issues.

> And no, it's not better to just punt on this issue and throw even more money at a greedy rent seeking middleman.

I think a reasonable fix would to be just renegotiate the fees and give a larger portion to the parks, while still trickling some % to the contractor. Maybe open it up to a bidding process. But frankly I think this contractor is doing a much better job than the government itself could. The feds are terrible at making functional websites. Obama started some efforts and Biden is continuing them (Login.gov, the TSA systems) but they're still not very seamless. It's just not a part of their culture. Maybe that will change in time, but until then, I'd rather have an expensive but functional service than some ideologically purer but unusable system.

It’s seems like a pretty cynical take to say that simply having a modern, standard platform for national parks (or whatever gov service) necessitates that platform must be cost inefficient.

I don’t see how improving the status quo and asking/enforcing federal contractors charge reasonable prices should be mutually exclusive.

Even if the contractual approach remained the same (Eg charge lottery fees and use that to pay Booz) presumably the point of this suit is to ensure that Booz are charging only charging a reasonable overhead for their services.

If it turns out their overhead is unreasonable one could either scale the fees down, or scale down Booz’s cut and give the rest to the specific parks for their own use.

I agree with you. I hope the suit results in either the elimination of the fees, or that a large portion (90%+) goes to the parks instead of the contractor.

Cost efficiency is like jumbo shrimp when it comes to government and you as the customer. OK, this website is now "profitable" charging x for y. Well, its not like Y was produced out of thin air beforehand. The taxpayer always pays. Its in the name. A system like this merely moves where the point of sale happens from one point in the stream to another. It's not any more profitable than what came before really, especially considering all this "profit" effectively is shot into the sun out of the system as it enters booze allens checkbooks instead of having it go back into the public purse.

Surely it’s a question of which tax payers. Is it the tax payers using national parks (and entering lotteries or making reservations) or all tax payers? Charging for service also allows non-tax payers to contribute too.

I’m not saying I’m for either approach but I still the cost efficiency is orthogonal to how it’s funded.

If it were more transparent how much Booz were making, and how much web traffic, reservations, lottery entries, etc they were dealing with then the reasonable profit overhead for their work could be more easily be understood by the public.

> Surely it’s a question of which tax payers. Is it the tax payers using national parks (and entering lotteries or making reservations) or all tax payers? Charging for service also allows non-tax payers to contribute too.

The thing is they aren't contributing to anything but booze allen hamiltons bottom line. None of this money goes into the parks department. Them taking a "reasonable profit overhead" amounts to parasitic loss. There's no magic sauce with web development, plenty of people understand it. This can be done in house at cost just as easily as its done in booze allen hamilton's house.

Experience with government sites tells me otherwise.

I use plenty of good government sites. I think pubmed is an example of how powerful a site can be when its designed purely for function versus advertising. You can do all sorts of interesting operations both in search and with an accompanying command line utility that directly interfaces with the database. There's probably a higher percentage of "bad" private sites than bad government sites imo.

I have never used a site built by the government that I would say is anywhere close to as good as recreation.gov

Yet here we are in a thread about how this website is facing lawsuits so I don't think its a great success.

As both a web dev and a parks lover... have you tried to use the agencies' own sites much? Even for a flagship park like Yosemite (https://www.nps.gov/yose/index.htm), it's hard to figure out how the different permits work. They're way down the page, requires going through several similar-sounding pages, all to no obvious next step. Even something as basic as having clear calls-to-action aren't there.

And figuring out where to go in the park... what's the difference between Plan Your Visit and Things to Do and Places to See? Why is it so hard to get a cohesive map that shows not just where to sleep but also the best places to visit and the recommended driving/hiking routes? What's the difference between a standard map, a brochure map, a simple map, a park map, and a valley map? Why aren't road closures and other alerts reflected on the maps?

Why doesn't the Fees page talk about permit or camping fees at all?

Which areas of the park are reservation-only, which are permitted, which are first-come-first serve?

These are just basic examples I pulled off one site. Most NP sites are like that. And remember this is for Yosemite, one of the country's (if not the world's) most visited tourist destinations, and they couldn't even do basic UX well. This isn't for a lack of knowledge (the on-the-ground rangers are awesome! talk to one next time before you venture forth!), but digital isn't a priority to them. It's not even an afterthought. It's more often than not "oh, I don't know how that works or who works on it or who pays for it".

Before Recreation.gov and ReserveAmerica before it, digital efforts WERE often done in-house, to disastrous effect. Even now, you will usually find better visitor's guides and resources outside of official NPS sites, like on Alltrails or random blogs or "best of" lists.

There is no magic sauce in web development, but it does take a particular type of agency to be able to make good pages with a focus on the end-user. Maybe to you and I such a site is relatively simple to set up. But that is NOT the NPS's strong suit at all, and it would be a forever uphill battle to convince their administrators and the Department of Interior and Congress to focus on usability. I doubt many of them have ever tried to book their own reservation.

Many of their parks don't even run their own restaurants and lodging[1] (which any tourist destination usually would), but you expect them to do well running a multi-agency, multi-site, multi-rule booking system? It's just not practical given the current staffing and skillset.

[1] If you think outsourcing to Booz is bad, yeesh, the hospitality concessionaires like Aramark are even worse. Talk about overpriced and poor quality =/

>There is no magic sauce in web development, but it does take a particular type of agency to be able to make good pages with a focus on the end-user. Maybe to you and I such a site is relatively simple to set up. But that is NOT the NPS's strong suit at all, and it would be a forever uphill battle to convince their administrators and the Department of Interior and Congress to focus on usability. I doubt many of them have ever tried to book their own reservation.

This is exactly why the private option is just as bad as the apathetic public one: in the end they are the same end result of a less than optimal ui/ux because they come from the same underlying issue of an administration that prefers to either not deal with it appropriately or toss the hot potato to someone else to take the blame of not dealing with it appropriately.

I still stand behind my stance that its not impossible to make a good website in house, and that bringing in outside profiteers is always a mistake compared to hiring those same exact project managers with those same exact visions for the website on an internal basis.

But in the end they are not the same result. Recreation.gov is way better than what the agencies tried to do individually, in-house, before. This isn't a hypothetical, it's the actual historical pathway we went through to arrive at this point. Our shitty public option, where it existed at all, was thankfully replaced by a much superior centralized public-private partnership.

Those exact same project managers probably would never have wanted to work directly for the NPS to begin with, dealing with government clearances and pay scales and bureaucracies for what, maybe half to 70% of their private-sector pay? I'm currently job-hunting for a public-sector web dev job and it's not easy to jump through their hoops, and that's for someone who's purposely seeking them out. Would a less civically-minded PM even bother?

Good web development isn't just about code, but largely culture, a sort of user-focused product culture that's hard enough to find in tech proper, harder still in government. Congress doesn't even THINK about these issues, much less try to put out good requirements for them. It's easier for them to sign a check (or a rent-seeking agreement) than to spin up what would basically amount to a new digital agency from scratch (which I actually think would be a great idea, like what the United States Digital Service is tasked with)... but that takes time to get off the ground. In the meantime Recreation.gov (and ReserveAmerica before it) have served the public well for the last decade or so, at the expense of some minor taxpayer dollars -- still much more bang for the buck than we get out of a typical war or panicked pandemic response, or housing Secret Service agents at private resorts or whatever.

If and when our government improves, then yes, we should in-house essential and basic services like web development. But our government doesn't seem to be improving on that front, and efforts to push it forward (like a Green New Deal) faltered. The current administration did manage to push through a lot of infrastructure dollars, but it remains to be seen whether that'll pay off (and whether it can survive the next Republican administration). Fingers crossed... but until then, god damn it, let me have my easily reserved campsites, please, if only so I can get away once in a while without having to think about how shitty the government is!

> Imagine if we had a similar system for the departments of motor vehicles... pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes online instead of hours at the local office.

You don't have that? The only time I've ever had to visit a DMV office in the decade and a half was upon first moving to the state since they need to take a photo for the new ID and inspect the VIN number on the new registration. There was some sort of ticketing system so even when I got there without an appointment, I didn't have to stand in line long

The online stuff is usually cheaper since its all renewals.

It just depends on your state and what particular service you need. I've moved around a lot and lived in a few states, and some of them were particularly bad.

But yes, simple in-state renewals tend to be the easiest, and can often be done online. But things like custom license plates (for an already registered vehicle) or cross-state transfers (when you've been driving for 20+ years) or changing your address or donor status or whatever... can be more difficult than necessary.

The emissions testing place near me charges over $10 fee for credit cards for renewing your tags, and cash is not accepted! It's outrageous, and the line is out the door to get renewals everyday. The number of government endorsed middleman scams is ridiculous.

> Imagine if we had a similar system for the departments of motor vehicles...

So petition your state reps to do it. AZ provides tools for self-service for most common tasks. With the exception of buying a car out of state and wanting to move a vanity plate over a few years ago, I can’t remember the last time I went to the DMV. It helps that our licenses don’t expire until we’re 65, so until my kids need to get their license, I don’t see a need to go back.

My vanity plate - FREEBSD -required an appeal to get to begin with because their system flagged it as a drug reference (free based). I had to _mail_(!) an appeal letter. When I went to transfer it, it was reflagged and they couldn’t even help me at the DMV, and instead of going through the appeal process again I just dropped it.

I don't think I've ever successfully petitioned anything from any government, local or state, much less federal. I've tried. Our governments don't seem to be set up to respond to your average constituents at all, just rich businesspeople and politicos.

These days it's all about culture wars and inflation, and no representative cares about day to day services and infrastructure.

> Imagine if we had a similar system for the departments of motor vehicles... pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes online instead of hours at the local office. Who wouldn't pay for that if they could afford it?

I can't tell if this is a reference to AAA or you're not aware of it? That's basically what the AAA membership gets you.

But at least in California, the DMV these days directly supports doing all the common things online so I haven't had a AAA membership in a long time nor have I had to go in person to the DMV in a long time.

What AAA can and cannot do for you varies by state. I don't live in California (any longer).

> pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes online instead of hours at the local office

A AAA membership in California does this for you for some things. Zero wait to register a purchased vehicle in silicon valley, possibly Mountain View I don't remember it's been a couple of years.

On the other hand I look like an axe murderer on my CA drivers license as the convoluted process took three hours and required starting over twice due to mistakes by the clerks.

I always here people having such trouble at CA DMVs and I wonder how that ends up happening. I don't have any problem and I go to pretty busy big city DMVs too. I think its because I book an appointment ahead of time online, because whenever I show up they usher me right in to the clerk past the line of pissed off people outside. One time when this happened the person first in line nearly fought the DMV worker for letting me in, people behind him had to try and calm him down and I got inside as soon as I could.

There is a lot of variance between different DMV offices in California, between different services, and between the individual staff members who are helping you.

I've had no-appointment things get done in 5 minutes as a walkup, and also 3-hour waits despite having an appointment. Total crapshoot =/

I used to think California's was bad, then I tried to move my license to Chicago... that took 8+ hours (literally... got there before opening and stayed until after closing) at the local office there, 4-5 different sets of lines (3 of them in the same office), and I think a total of 12 bureaucrats, queue watcher, and security guards.

Then I tried had to do the same thing in Oregon a few years later. That took one person about 20 minutes to finish.

It's just crazy how much variance there is between states & offices.

The downside of a central system is that sites can't set really custom rules. Things like "we don't allow anyone not associated with the XYZ festival to book a spot in the 3 days leading up to the XYZ festival" are really hard to handle with a big centralized booking system - whereas they are easy to handle with a little local office that does everything by hand.

Yeah, a complex rules engine is indeed one of the challenges of such a system. But you can at least handle the most common scenarios and take some of the load off the park. Like in Yosemite, a basic Half Dome permit is handled through recreation.gov, but if you're doing overnight backpacking or big wall climbing in addition to Half Dome, those could be handled differently and outside of recreation.gov... https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/hdpermits.htm

For a festival, though, I imagine it could be handled similarly to hotel rooms... block off a certain # of sites for the exclusive use of some "XYZFEST23" coupon code or similar. Not sure if recreation.gov actually supports that, but it's not an insurmountable problem.

I think these types of fees happen often, are discovered, then they are refunded. This even happened with me with a government agency where we had a collegial relationship. The administrator found out we had paid for data that was supposed to be public, told us no one was authorized to impose a fee, and joked that they must have wanted to throw an office party or something. He was actually very serious about apologizing and refunding the fees, but it wasn’t a big deal.

It becomes a problem when people take the attitude that what’s done is done. The fees should be refunded, at least from the consultants back into the public purse, and they should take much greater precautions when it comes to “public private partnerships” and monetizing access to public land.

A centralised system should be cheaper.

Instead of 50 states all having separate DMV offices, all too small for a decent website, now it is just one office double the size with a small web dev team. That should be substantially better and cheaper.

Same for the forest service.

as someone else is already saying -- Arizona basically already has this for DMVs. There's a parallel system of privately owned and operated offices where you can make an appointment to e.g. get your drivers license. You show up right around your appointment time, there's somebody ready to help you within minutes, and everything is streamlined / easy. Most pleasant experience I've ever had of getting a license in a new state. In that case it was never clear to me whether I paid extra for the private service or not, but whatever I paid seemed unremarkable.

I wish we had a trickle-up, trickle-down system where states could experiment with different strategies/providers for tackling some public use case, and the successful ones could push that up to Congress to then disseminate back down to other states.

But alas, either that never happens because nobody cares (most digital services) or it becomes a political battleground (California vs Texas in education). Sometimes I hate our system of powerful states vs centralized nations...

> But alas, either that never happens because nobody cares (most digital services) or it becomes a political battleground (California vs Texas in education). Sometimes I hate our system of powerful states vs centralized nations...

You hit the nail on the head. We have a trickle down system, where states implement services differently. The reason states don't learn from each other is because of the huge culture war. Texas would rather freeze the state than learn from California, and California would rather pay 20x for public infrastructure than accept a contractor based out of Nevada due to the state's political leanings. It infects every piece of cross-state collaboration and is also why Federal budgetary politics are so acrimonious these days.

> pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes online instead of hours at the local office. Who wouldn't pay for that if they could afford it?

Prompt access to government services should not require extra payment. Because then you're providing them an incentive to further kneecap the system. Hypothetically, imagine if this figure (20%) was now 2000%. Would that be fair? I'm sure some people would be able to pay that sum for processing in minutes, while the rest of us have to wait several hours.

> Imagine if we had a similar system for the departments of motor vehicles... pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes online instead of hours at the local office.

The counties here have provided that for at least 30 years and without any 3rd party or paid priority for the non-poor.

I doubt there was online self-service for the DMV in 1993 anywhere in the world.

Not the internet as we know it today, but I wouldn't be surprised if some isolated departments experimented with dial-in services back then. If you could make a phone call and you had a modem, you could connect to a remote terminal.

My fault. I missed the online qualification and rushed right to part where our tax dollars buy great service and low wait times (and Sat hours). We've only had an online option for about 10 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com