Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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