|
|
|
|
|
| |
|||
Why is the number of visitors going down at this national treasure?
Editorial from the Fresno Bee, January 6, 2002
It wasn't that long ago when tourists seemed to be loving Yosemite National
Park to death. Every year more tourists would come to the park. Annual attendance
passed the 3 million mark, then rose soon to 4 million. There were fears that
the park might have to be closed frequently during the summer on days when
attendance grew too large for staff and nature to handle. Then five years
ago something happened. Many visitors stopped coming.
While final figures for 2001 aren't in, visitation to Yosemite was on track to be down 4% for the year (about 3.4 million tourists for the first 11 months). Compared with 1996, when visitation approached 4.2 million, attendance is down closer to 15%.
Is the park's declining popularity a good or bad thing? Is it a function of a higher entrance fee, changes in vacation preferences, Sept. 11, perceptions of overcrowding, a soft economy or something else?
Getting the answer to those questions is important for policy reasons. If tourists have decided there are other places they want to visit that's one thing. But if people are passing up the grand thrill of visiting Yosemite because it's too crowded or too expensive, policy-makers ought to know so they can react.
The problems aren't just in the lap of the park service. Surrounding communities depend enormously on Yosemite attendance for their own economic vitality, as we all saw several years ago when budget games in Washington, D.C., caused the park to be closed briefly.
And it's not just the "gateway" communities up in the Sierra Nevada that suffer. Down in the flatlands, a great deal of the tourist trade that passes through Fresno is linked at least partially with Yosemite. Day trips to the park, for instance, are a great selling point when trying to bring convention business to Fresno.
Yosemite is not
the only national park with declining attendance. Yellowstone experienced
a similar decrease last year, and the drop at the Grand Canyon was twice as
large as Yosemite's.
The most dramatic falloff was in San Francisco, home of the Golden Gate National
Recreation Area, Fort Point and the closed prison on Alcatraz Island. These
destinations account for three-fourths of the drop in visitation in national
parks throughout the West and Hawaii.
Undoubtedly the drop in San Francisco had a lot to do with the events of Sept.
11. Tourism to the city immediately plummet-ed, and the industry has yet to
fully recover. The trend isn't so easy to explain, however, for a jewel such
as Yosemite.
The entrance fee to the "big three" (Yosemite, Grand Canyon and
Yellowstone) increased to $20 per vehicle four years ago. This provided some
much-needed funds for maintenance inside these parks.
But was this
enough to discourage some visitors who would have come just for the day-many
of them out of Fresno? And is this drop in drive-in tourism necessarily an
undesirable outcome, given the physical limitations of Yosemite Valley for
vehicle traffic? There are some tough trade-offs here: The poor should never
be priced out of parks, but the parks do need money to survive.
The Park Service keeps meticulous figures on who visits these national treasures.
They don't have much of a handle, however, on who decided not to visit, and
why. It's a question, particularly in Yosemite, that merits some research,
and an answer.
|
|
|
|