US and Canadian National Parks: A study in contrasts

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

It doesn’t have to trump national, just coexist with it. eg something like:

  • 5000 annual lottery slots for people within 100 miles
  • 100,000 for veterans, guaranteed entry for active duty
  • 200,000 for seniors
  • 2 million for everyone else

In a scheme like that, the local access carveout isn’t even a rounding error. I don’t know the optimal numbers, but something above zero would be nice.

Anyway, what I wouldn’t give to have a government where this sort of nuance could even be discussed. Instead, we get authoritarian vandalism defacing NPS web pages with nonsense like “radical leftists shut down your parks”: Retired federal land managers say that partisan shutdown language is chilling : NPR

Give them a few years and I’d be surprised if the parks weren’t all sold to Musk to turn into private resorts and charging diners.

22

That’s fine - as long as they pay full price.

Hell, no. Or are you going to have the same for nurses, for firemen, for garbage workers?

23

Not everybody is able to travel long distances. The people who can’t should be entitled to a chance at those local places which can provide it. And the people who are able to travel long distances have a large number of places to choose from.

24

I was never talking about price differentiation. If it was up to me all the parks would be free at the point of entry (and paid by taxes rather than visitation). Ideally this would include foreigners too, who would have a separate lottery pool too.

I’d expand that to include civil servants, sure, anyone who works for a federal, state, or local government agency. But that’s not really the point. The groupings just mirror the existing NPS pass groupings, which have special discounts for veterans, seniors, the disabled, etc.: Fees & Passes - Yosemite National Park (U.S. National Park Service)

Personally I’d love it if more nurses, firemen, and garbage workers visited our parks! It’s theirs too. If you made me king, I’d give everyone a floating long weekend PTO specifically to go visit whichever National Park they wanted to. It ain’t up to me though :joy:

25

That’s inverting the argument - you’re then effectively punishing those who are able by locking them out of destinations that might be, for instance, a once-in-a-lifetime thing for them. Not everyone who does travel does so willy-nilly - for many of them, a particular NP might be a bucket-list, save-for-years kind of thing (Grand Canyon, Redwoods, Yellowstone and Yosemite are all very much that kind of place, I’d say)

This whole thread is about price differentiation.

I also think parks should be free entry, and it’s the amenities that should fund them (in addition to taxes)

And I have an issue with that, too…
IMO, military veterans shouldn’t receive any special privileges other than those that arise out of having been employed e.g VA and pensions. General civil society should not be granting them any favoured staus.

26

They should have some kind of bonus for anyone who can spell that off the top of their head.