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Crowd control National parks try to cope with the effects of automobiles Stories by JOE KOLMAN Gazette Bozeman Bureau BIG SKY - America's national parks grew up around the automobile. Whereas trains brought only the affluent to the national parks, the car allowed for affordable travel and freedom of choice for the masses.
 Gazette photos/JOE KOLMAN Millions of people visit Yellowstone Park each year, most of them in personal automobiles. But with the cars also came problems and now managers of the national refuges are finding that traffic is aging the natural jewels beyond their years. Deteriorating roads. Dirty air. Not enough parking. Noise pollution. Overcrowded facilities. Irate visitors. All are the result of more than 70 years of focusing visits to national parks around the automobile, according to park managers and transportation experts who gathered here last week for a conference on transportation alternatives and technology for use in national parks. "We don't have too many people," said Jim Tuck, the transportation director for Grand Canyon National Park. "We have too many cars." About 200 people attended the conference, organized by the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University-Bozeman. Many agreed that the challenge facing the park system is to strike a balance between making parks accessible to visitors while preserving the natural resources that people come to see in the first place. Glacier National Park, which is dealing with repairs of Going to the Sun Road, and Yellowstone National Park are facing many of the same issues as other parks in the country. "Roads and potholes are almost as famous as our bison," said Yellowstone Superintendent Marv Jensen. Parking in Yellowstone can be scarce and on some roads during peak season, traffic flow can be reduced to near gridlock. With more than four million people expected to visit Yellowstone in the year 2015, Yellowstone Chief Planner John Sacklin said park officials are seriously looking at how visitors are moved in and around the park. Nationally, the Park Service is moving toward increasing public transit systems. In 1996, President Clinton issued a directive to improve public transportation in the parks and a year later the secretaries of Transportation and the Interior inked an agreement to develop a comprehensive plan toward that end. Getting people out of their cars will reduce pollution and preserve open space while preventing the development sprawl just outside of parks that often comes with heavy traffic, said Helen Knoll of the Federal Transit Administration.
As part of the agreement, five national parks were targeted for pilot projects which include a free propane bus service in Maine's Acadia National Park, a proposed shuttle bus service in Zion National Park and a light rail and shuttle system proposed for the south rim of Grand Canyon National Park. Of the 378 areas managed by the Park Service, about 50, including Glacier and Little Bighorn Battlefield, use some form of public transportation, according to a 1996 National Park Service study. About half were surface transportation, such as bus or rail, and half were ferries. Just more than half of the systems were managed by park officials but owned and operated by contract with private companies. There are several keys to making a park transit system work, said Kevin Percival, a transportation designer for the Park Service in Denver. The system cannot be utilitarian. The design must allow visitors to see the sites, using large windows or open tops - he showed a slide of the historic "Jammer" buses in Glacier as an example. There must be spontaneity, the ability to stop and look at bears and wolves, for example. The system must allow for the trappings of tourists such as large backpacks and bikes. And the ride should be affordable. "These are truly public parks and we need to keep prices down," Percival said. Many aspects of the national vision can be applied to Yellowstone, Sacklin said. But, as always, the nation's first national park presents some unique challenges. Yellowstone's sheer size, the number of attractions and entrances make the possibility of a park-wide bus system unlikely, Sacklin said. Large parking lots on the edges of the parks would be unpopular. And many of the successful bus systems in parks are loop systems, meaning you come out the same way you went in and often spend the night outside the park - however, that is not the way Yellowstone visitors prefer to vacation. A 1990 Yellowstone transportation study found that 75 percent of visitors came in one entrance and left through another and stayed two nights in Yellowstone. Because of that, Sacklin said Yellowstone officials are thinking of offering public transportation in small increments, such as a shuttle system from Grant Village that would stop at geyser basins and trail heads. Or working with gateway communities to encourage people to leave their cars at motels or campgrounds and take a bus into the park. Incentives would likely include an on-board tour guide and reduced fees for bus riders. Sacklin said hurdles will include finding funding for repairing existing roads and for maintaining a transit system. He and others also said park officials will have to attempt to change the way Americans have grown up feeling about their cars and national parks. "They don't have to enjoy Yellowstone from their automobile," Sacklin said.
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