I don't intend to passively inject an opinion — just trying to understand your position.
In this way, it can be considered exploitative since the proceeds don’t go back into “the pot” to any degree.
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.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if booze allens own college summer interns are doing the bulk of the work on this website.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yosemite is popular and began to use mandatory busses. That seems reasonable, though unrelated to the topic of junk website fees.
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.
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 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"...
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.
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.
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.
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
It just seems egregiously expensive.