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This is something where every single person who appreciates public lands should be mad as hell, and letting their elected officials know. For a more in-depth a
by qrohlf 3y ago
This is something where every single person who appreciates public lands should be mad as hell, and letting their elected officials know.
For a more in-depth analysis of the dubious legality of the whole situation, see Matt Stoller's excellent article "Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?" [1]
Also, as someone who runs a private, substantially more aggressive availability monitor than outdoorstatus.com (updates every minute rather than every 30 minutes), the unfortunate reality is that the permit scarcity has created something of an automation arms race.
Looking at my analytics for today for a few examples, I see 1 permit availability for the Enchantments that was snagged in less than 5 minutes after being posted, some availability for Lost Coast that disappeared in under 4 minutes, and finally 5 different availabilities in Yosemite's Upper Pines campground that disappeared in under 60 seconds. A 30 minute update rate is, sadly, not going to do you much good if you want to be competitive at reservations for any popular site near the Bay Area on a weekend.
In a lot of cases, the latency of the Twilio -> SMS process is long enough that by the time I get a notification of availability, it's already been claimed by someone else's bot.
This is depressing because, while I have the knowledge and tools to play in this adversarial sandbox of permit acquisition, the majority of people in this country do not. Your access to public lands should not be contingent upon your network programming skills or how many IP addresses you're able to stripe your requests across to avoid ratelimiting.
While I expect to see many more pay-to-play services like Outdoor Status, Campflare, Campnab, Campsite Monitor, etc. pop up over the next few years, what I'd really like to see is a service that disrupts Booz Allen Hamilton with a business model that eliminates its monopoly and the junk fees that are central to how it profiteers off its role as the Ticketmaster of public lands access.
[1] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting-us-back https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...
- seattle_spring 3y agoSide tangent: Wow, the Lost Coast is a lottery now? I through-hiked it in 2007 and no one was there. I barely meet anyone who has even heard of it.
- asciimike 3y agoSeriously. I did it in ~2010 and ~2013 and we saw a few dozen people, besides the commune living at the south end.
- greendave 3y agoIt’s not a lottery, it’s all 100% reservable on October 1 for the next year. I’ve been 10 times in the past 15 years and every year the permits are harder to get because of the demand and the bots. The irony is that the permits are so popular and the fees so low that I’d estimate 30%+ of the permits that are bought actually don’t get used. On my most recent visit, we saw less than 10 people total on our first day a few weeks back.
- ryandrake 3y agoAs a non-hiker, I had no idea access to national parks was gated behind some unholy combination of Ticketmaster and gambling. This is asinine--but a uniquely American flavor of asinine. The fact that a private business consulting company collects most of the money makes it even more American Asinine. I feel like my fingers are turning red, white, and blue just typing that out. I (naively) always thought you just drove to your destination, parked and went hiking.
- ploxiln 3y agoMost places in the US are like that - just show up. Some places are too popular and would be way too crowded, and the situation is pretty dire for the most majestic and famous places around SF. I did the popular half dome trail in yosemite, jeez ... 10 years ago, and despite the limits it was quite a crowded line, at the cable you hold while climbing up the slope of the dome. My family goes hiking in Shenandoah in Virginia almost every year (probably 15 times in my life) and we don't reserve entry or trails or anything, and there's no lines. Anyway, it's a kinda funny situation - do you want to promote the outdoors to the general populace? Do you want them to be accessible to all? Well you just can't, the popular places will be absolutely crushed and destroyed and quite dangerous too. There's plenty of un-popular places people could go, but they're not popular ...
- zhoujianfu 3y agoThey should just make it a raffle instead of first come first served. That’s what all the online drop collectible places do now after a few years of fighting the bot arms race.
- cldellow 3y agoCanada has some national parks that do something like this. Lake O'Hara's booking system this year is a random queue: > In lieu of a random draw, Parks Canada will be employing a queuing system to help manage the expected high demand. Users may navigate to the reservation service webpage beginning at 7:30 AM. At 8:00 AM all users waiting will be randomly assigned a place in the queue. This is not influenced by how long users have been waiting. Any users arriving to the website after 8:00 am will be placed in the back of the line. When users reach their turn, they will be alerted via an on-screen message. At that point, they have 30 minutes to proceed to the reservation website and make a reservation.
- quickthrower2 3y agoIf SMS latency is too much why not release an app for your site to give an instant notification?
- qrohlf 3y agoI solved the response-time problem in a different way, but that would be one option you could use to cut down how much a notification pipeline contributes to your time-to-claim-permit latency.
- asdfman123 3y agoOff topic, but I realized that I can initiate a backpacking trip by walking out of my front door near El Camino, over the foothills, and all the way to Half Moon Bay. Maybe secretly camping in a state park up there in between. This is extremely novel to me, being from Houston, and I definitely want to try it now.
- zupzupper 3y agoLook up the skyline to sea trail, it's near you.and wonderful.
- qrohlf 3y agoHave a peek at https://doingmiles.com/hike-sf/ https://doingmiles.com/hike-sf/ for some longer itineraries like this. Lots of options if you're willing to do a little stealth camping (please be ethical/considerate [1]) [1] good writeup from the same authors https://doingmiles.com/techniques-stealth/ https://doingmiles.com/techniques-stealth/
- carterharrison 3y agocampflare aint pay 2 play #freeforthepeople
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y agoIf you find yourself stressed by the process of reserving campsites online, I’d encourage you to just go to random public land and camp there. It’s legal by default to camp on BLM and Forest Service land and you do not need permission from Booz Allen Hamilton to do it. There are endless adventures to be had and plenty of room for everyone. People competing to fill out online forms so they can be allocated appointments to enjoy specific small segments of the great outdoors is a truly bizarre phenomenon. If you enjoy participating in that system, more power to you, but if you don’t, then just go anywhere in the much larger portion of public land that isn’t administered in that fashion.
- et-al 3y agoYes, but please, please, please leave no trace (LNT): https://www.nps.gov/articles/leave-no-trace-seven-principles.htm https://www.nps.gov/articles/leave-no-trace-seven-principles...
- lazyasciiart 3y agoIt is not really bizarre that people really want to go to the places that have e.g built toilets.
- granshaw 3y agoNot everyone wants to pee squatting in the bushes, or not have access to running water or electricity
- local_crmdgeon 3y agoWhy not? That's what camping is. What you're describing isn't just "this is public land. Enjoy"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mschuster91 3y agoThe core problem is a tragedy of the commons scenario. Basically, the demand for tourism to natural parks (or, such as in the case of Venice, Amsterdam and others, entire cities) is way too large to allow unfettered access by the public. So there's two options - limit access to those who can afford it (e.g. by raising serious tourism taxes), or do it in a lottery. Both have obvious downsides: making it expensive is direct discrimination against the poor, and lotteries risk families not being able to go because not everyone gets a ticket or, as we're seeing here, people gaming the system to bypass the lottery or a black market run by scalpers. There is no good solution.
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoHow do scalpers get around ID requirements? Purchases/lotteries/whatever allow one entry per natural person, using an ID. You have to indicate ownership of that ID to take up the entry ticket. Then you have to show the ID on entry. Typically such places will buy back tickets and you get a refund if they sell. You can use 'receipt of state assistance' (in the UK this is called 'benefits') as a marker for poverty [definitely not perfect!] and only allow access to, for example, a low cost lottery on entry for such poor people. It's not perfect, but is that not at least good?
- adrr 3y agoWhat about people that don't have IDs which are the poor and also kids?
- dbspin 3y agoYou've forgotten the effect of advertising. There's enormous induced demand for these things, which could be instantly reduced by a prohibition (or time limitation) of advertising, broadcast rights etc. Right now BAH are enormously incentivised to promote the hell out of these places, as are third parties that help you 'game the system'. Take the money out of the system and you limit it to organic reach - you aikido the pay to speak nature of contemporary social media.
- mschuster91 3y ago
- heelix 3y agoHere in Minnesota, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) adjacent to Canada is on a permit system as well. Within 3 minutes of the permits opening in January for this season, all the traditional weekend sites entry points on the Grand Marais side were gone. In the 20-30 years I've been doing it, I've never seen anything like it before. Our camping group is absolutely coding bots for next year. Going in as a human a couple minutes after the bell does not work. This should not be.
- smilbandit 3y agoIn this day and age I feel that things like this should have an in person registration for a few days or week before the online registration.
- bitshiftfaced 3y agoHow do you fix the problem?
- throw9away6 3y ago[flagged]
- gnramires 3y agoOne common solution to this type of problem is a (different kind of!) lottery. You should register for one or more time slots (up to N), and there should be a lottery to decide who goes (just randomly). After winning, your other reservations should reset.
- ghaff 3y agoYeah, there are a relative handful of places in the US/North America that, during remotely popular times, access has to be rationed for good reasons. The Enchantments are definitely one of those--I'm resigned to never be organized/lucky enough to go there (and that's not even a national park). And once you're going to ration, it's just a question of how: very high fees, lottery for applications within some window, first-come first-served x days in advance, queue at the ranger office on the morning of and hope you get lucky or have to go somewhere else... Excessive fees going to a for-profit company is a separate matter but doesn't change the fact that, for any reasonable fee structure, way more people want to camp/stay/hike in certain places than those places can reasonably support. Different approaches just have different drawbacks. In general, I'd probably disfavor technological sniping approaches for most sites in this day and age in favor of a lottery with a wider window. (And for most public properties just increasing pricing isn't really the right answer.)
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago> Excessive fees going to a for-profit company is a separate matter It's actually the entire subject of TFA.
- snarf21 3y agoCurious: Does a policy of making these things non-transferable solve the issue?