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...

I (naively) always thought you just drove to your destination, parked and went hiking.

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 ...

There is a raffle. And the money from the ruffle goes to Booz Allen Hamilton.

> 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.

Source: I won a lot of queues by Sony, AMD, and Walmart.

Sony was restricting PS5s by address at one point, but adding an apartment number (to a house) or a 0 to an address got around the limit for the first year.

Depending on how valuable the item is, an incredible amount of manpower will go into defeating bot protections. I made a lot of money after spending a lot of time doing adversarial research and bot development.

That’s the thing about these lotteries, rejecting people isn’t an issue.

I’ve beaten every queue system I’ve come across, and that includes at least 8 different retailers.

Not really, in cases where it actually matters like car rentals they don’t let you do many things that “fool” the half assed systems.

Frankly most queue systems aren’t designed to be robust because the company doesn’t care they are making the same money either way.

I believe they allow 20 per day. 10 are first-come first-served and 10 are a lottery you can enter for a few dollars in advance.

Seems pretty fair to me.

The lottery makes most money go to Booz Allen Hamilton.

Does BAH keep the whole fee? Do they keep some of it? Did they get paid $0 and only get the fee?

Booz Allen wouldn't have offered to design and run the whole thing "for free" if it wasn't immensely popular! They and others like them are not called "beltway bandits" for nothing.

But how do we know that's true. Has the author seen the contract between the government and Booz Allen?

On top of that, NPS seems to have been evasive about the situation and has been resistant to releasing supervision data on how much money is actually involved.

This situation has been widely reported on, not only in this article but by Matt Stoler (https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...) and in the NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/travel/nps-recreation-gov...). There has been a class-action lawsuit over it but I don't think it got anywhere, it's not at all clear that there's any legal problem with this situation despite appearing to be a massive grift on the public. Originally, the structure of the contract (where BAH funds the project by imposing their own fees) was hailed as innovative since it meant there was "no taxpayer money" committed.

BAH recreation.gov contract: https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2023-03/AG-3187-...

NPS fee order: https://www.nps.gov/policy/DOrders/DO_22.pdf

https://www.boozallen.com/s/insight/thought-leadership/reinv...

> Recreation.gov was an investment for Booz Allen, designed collaboratively with participating agencies, but at no cost to the federal government. Instead of a traditional cost structure, the unique contractual agreement is a transaction-based fee model that lets the government and Booz Allen share in risk, reward, results, and impact. This is a true public-private partnership—it uses no government money.

Of course they word this in a slimy, dishonest way. Boggles my mind that immediately after saying "no cost" they describe an "alternative cost structure", completely contradicting itself.

Some fees collected go to the Park Service, and some don't. Does Booz keep everything else? What are the contract details with the government?

WORSE YET, they get to set the fee themselves! The park system just goes along with what they pick.

They got in trouble for this because by law there was supposed to be a public comment period regarding fee changes.

They got some judge or official to sign off something saying effectively: "x = whatever BAH decides; Fee = x;"

Their primary problem was resellers - it's still a scramble when the ticket sale begins.

https://glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/0...

But perfect is the enemy of good, so if a price tag $10,000 meant some rich bought their way in and a good chunk of normal people got in anyway, that's effectively a tax on rich people, so I'm for it. (Of course, you'd spin it differently so rich people can pose as doing something for the environment and whatnot.)

Side benefit - when Congress is doing its annual budget fight, the National Parks Service can remind certain members that lots of donation-giving wealthy people care a lot about the National Parks.

Giving them a ticket is equivalent to giving them money, but restricting it be spent on park tickets only. Very condescending and paternalistic, isn't it?

Are you afraid they are going to spend their ticket money on booze?

Raffle is not giving them money. Raffle is giving them a chance. No matter how much money you give to poor people, rich people will always be able to afford to outbid them.

So sure, giving money to poor people (or better jet, making sure they get decent pay in the first place) is good idea.

And raffle makes sure, prices stay reasonable so that even poor/middle class people can on occasion enjoy the parks.

You do auctions when you want to maximize profit. You do raffles when you need to rate limit access to a limited resource.

(And why would you want to keep poor people from re-selling their tickets? Perhaps they need the x dollars that the ticket is more than the they need the ticket?)

(Though arguably with bots and scrapers, that's maybe what they are now anyway.)

> It'd be the bottom 98%. You're proposing turning certain national/state-owned campsites into luxury experiences.

I don't see how that works. We don't see the top 2% win all auctions on ebay, do we? Nor do we see them buying up all tickets to see Justin Bieber in concert (to bring an example where supply is limited, Mr Bieber can only give so many concerts in his lifetime). Rich people don't even own all houses, either.

It is very much on the high end.

Charging everyone the same fee (set via auction) seems very equitable to me. It's a form of rationing that treats everyone the same.

Raffles are designed to produce inequality. Some get lucky, some don't.

And if you allow people to resell tickets, Raffles essentially turn into an auction anyway. But the profits go as windfall to a lucky few, not to the park.

(Naturally, you could ban poor people from reselling their ticket. On the grounds of 'we know better' than them that they really need their ticket, instead of the thousand dollar they could get for it on the secondary market. They'll probably just spend it on booze! /s)

False equivalent argumentation.

Edit: Excellent idea to give poor people money either way though. UBI!

Naturally, you could ban poor people from reselling their ticket. On the grounds that 'we know better' than them that they really need their ticket, instead of the thousand dollar they could get for it on the secondary market. They'll probably just spend it on booze! /s

Somehow people are fine with having healthcare, education, housing, transportation etc. being driven by market forces, but parks not? In my opinion the state should absolutely cash in on the lucrative public parks. Otherwise you will and up with scalpers and other perversions that will take their cut in pricing the true value of this good.

Giving poor people money in form of UBI or tax breaks is the way to go in distributing all public goods.

> Giving poor people money in form of UBI or tax breaks is the way to go in distributing all public goods.

Be careful, that's not the orthodox definition of public goods. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. For such goods, users cannot be barred from accessing or using them for failing to pay for them. Also, use by one person neither prevents access of other people nor does it reduce availability to others.[1] Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person.[2] This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, the fact that it can be used simultaneously by more than one person would be economically irrelevant.

Public goods (by the orthodox definition) don't need to be auctioned off, and can't be auctioned off: by definition, there's no way to keep the loser of the auction from enjoying the public good anyway.

You are right that most government provided goods, like public parks etc, should be charged for. And that includes roads.

However I wouldn't necessarily make a blanket statement that _all_ government goods should be provided like that. It's just a very strong default, and exceptions need a strong argument to convince me.

For example, some goods are very cheap to provide and very hard to exclude. Or their use has very big positive externalities.

An example that springs to mind are childhood vaccines. They are easy to exclude, but they are cheap to provide and other people benefit from you using them. So I am very sympathetic to an argument that the government should provide standard childhood vaccines for free, and perhaps even pay people to take them.

In principle you could still sell the vaccines and separately give people money for taking them. For cheap, well-established vaccines that would just be more hassle than it's worth.

For eg the first batches of the covid vaccine, it would have made a lot of sense though.

Wait, I thought we were talking about parks?

Establish a land value tax, if you want efficient taxation. You can't hide land, and you can't pass such a tax on, either.

The problem with LVT is that most billionaires don't have most of their wealth in land. It's just a specific version of a wealth tax that targets a form of wealth that is no longer the biggest factor in what makes the extremely rich, well, extremely rich. LVT won't turn Bezos or Musk into non-billionaires.

What was special about the Swiss proposal?

> The problem with LVT is that most billionaires don't have most of their wealth in land. It's just a specific version of a wealth tax that targets a form of wealth that is no longer the biggest factor in what makes the extremely rich, well, extremely rich. LVT won't turn Bezos or Musk into non-billionaires.

Bezos worked very hard and his company Amazon benefitted many customers, workers and investors. If you have a tax system manages to raise a lot of money to the government with no deadweight losses, then it's an extra bonus if it leaves Bezos to his billions, too. That should encourage other people to emulate him.

Land is still extremely important in the modern economy. You might think eg modern Internet companies don't have much to do with land, but for some reason they still mostly cluster in a few spots around the globe, like Silicon Valley; despite the high rent in those places. They must get some advantage from that land there.

An LVT would allow to drop income taxes and capital taxes to 0%.

The proposal taxed capital gains significantly higher than income from wages. It also had a wider definition of capital gain. The tax was also to only kick in for capital gains income exceeding a certain amount that exempted most median income earners' retirement accounts.

> Bezos worked very hard

You and I have very different views of this then. By this logic the midwive or nurse who delivered Jeff Bezos should deserve more wealth than him because she not only delivered the baby that went on to become the man to do all those things but also delivered many others throughout her career and likely spent long hours working just as hard if not harder. Or if you think considering indirect effects is unfair, literally any sanitation worker probably works harder and benefits people's lives more than Bezos ever did directly. And somehow all of them do their work without needing the existence of billionaires to encourage them because nobody ever became a billionaire by spending their life decluttering sewage systems or delivering babies.

Even if you were able to make the argument that Bezos worked thousands of times harder than the workers that made money for him, I disagree that we should compensate such "harder work" on a near-linear (or even exponential) scale because once spending a thousand dollars or one dollar becomes a rounding error for you, money stops being something you exchange for goods and services and starts being something you use to exert power over a supposedly democratic system.

If you believe in democracy (i.e. political power should be evenly distributed among the people), you either need to abandon capitalism (or more abstractly: the ability to exert political power by using money) or prevent the existence of billionaires (i.e. massive inequality in the distribution of money). If you also care about the climate crisis, the latter seems a no-brainer because without the ability to exert political power all the billionaires' money is good for is wasting resources by trying to figure out how many gold-plated yachts you can stack on top of each other.

> Land is still extremely important in the modern economy.

And yet you can't make an argument for why "modern Internet companies" cluster in a few places with high rent. If you want to fix the entire economy by introducing a land value tax maybe you should first have a solid grasp on why certain land is currently valuable and how an LVT would impact that.

> An LVT would allow to drop income taxes and capital taxes to 0%.

I know that Georgites believe this but you also completely sidestepped my point about LVT in essence being a limited wealth tax. This also presupposes that dropping income and capital taxes to 0% is something we want when the only historical data we have suggest that dropping income taxes and taxing capital gains lower than income from wages has led to a drastic widening of the wealth gap.

The LVT is a tool specifically designed to hurt landlords (and arguably it's not even very good at that as LVT on rented properties just translates to higher rents). It tries to solve "efficient land use". I'm not interested in making the market more efficient. I see market extremism as as much of a threat to humanity as religious extremism.

I don't see how that works. We don't see only rich people win all auctions on ebay, do we? Nor do we see them buying up all tickets to see Justin Bieber in concert (to bring an example where supply is limited, Mr Bieber can only give so many concerts in his lifetime). Rich people don't even own all houses, either. Nor do they eat all the meat.

For example, is it paternalistic to supply clean water via a municipal utility? Do you think that the commonwealth should give poor people enough money to buy clean water in a public market?

Access to national parks isn't a public good.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. For such goods, users cannot be barred from accessing or using them for failing to pay for them. Also, use by one person neither prevents access of other people nor does it reduce availability to others.[1] Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person.[2] This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, the fact that it can be used simultaneously by more than one person would be economically irrelevant.

How would you even run an auction on a good that's non-excludable? By definition, you can't keep the losers of the auction from using the good.

> For example, is it paternalistic to supply clean water via a municipal utility? Do you think that the commonwealth should give poor people enough money to buy clean water in a public market?

Sounds reasonable.

Most municipal utility (at least in the places I lived in) charge for the water they provide. Usually those charges are very reasonable.

It sounds like a lot of hassle to give poor people a weekly water ration in kind. At the very least, you need to involve the water utility in the bureaucracy that administers welfare. Seems like a lot of hassle.

Just giving poor people money that they can use to pay their utility bills seems much simpler in comparison. And that's eg what they do in Germany (the country where I know the most about how government welfare is run).

At most, you sometimes hear people suggest that the poor need some extra money, if eg electricity or water prices are suddenly higher than before. But I haven't really heard anyone seriously suggest giving poor people a water allowance. Is that common where you live?

However it would still be a bit silly to say that our government is providing free aircon to poor people.

Technically, they do. But it's such a niche case. Just like people don't typically go and fill up jugs at the public water fountains to flush their toilets at home with.

So you are technically correct, but it doesn't matter.

You end up with a situation where the wealthy can do everything and the poor can do nothing.

And then there's the super rich, who could buy out the possibility of anyone else participating, literally turning such places into their private playground for eternity if they so wished.

Like, what price could you price it at where:

1. You could afford to go occassionally

2. Elon Musk couldn't just buy out every single ticket for the next decade to make it their personal playground.

There's simply no feasible solution to that.

Just auctioning everything and letting capitalism take its course just denies a vast segment of society from participating at all for activities where demand outstrips supply.

Supply & Demand only works if supply can be increased, so that as prices rise there's incentive for greater supply.

For things like National Parks or Taylor Swift concerts, price discovery through "supply and demand" does not work because supply can't increase to match supply no matter the price.

You are vastly overestimating buying power of the richest people. Lets assume that some of them are really irrational and want to buy access to the single place by selling whole their wealth.

X entries per day, 365 day in a year, that is 3650*x tickets to buy out to cover 10 years.

Musk wealth: 171 000 000 000

Divided by 3650 = 46 849 315

If we sell only 50 tickets daily it is less than million of $ that Musk have available for each ticket.

There is over 60 million people with wealth higher wealth than that. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/203930/global-wealth-dis...).

If park increases number of tickets to 500 daily (~21 per hour) then we are talking about 600 million richest people that can try to outbid Musk on a single ticket.

In reality people like Musk probably would never spend even 1/100 of their wealth for any single attraction. If they had, they would not be that rich. Additionally park could easily increase number of tickets if those are not used.

Wow, and for anyone else for only a million dollars people can buy an entire day in what was once a free federal location!

Meanwhile, let's look at Yellowstone. Over a decade, they will sell about $110MM in passes (just a 10x of what they generated recently.) Let's say at an auction the passes go for an average of 20x that. So for $2.2 billion, someone can buy exclusive access to a 2.2 million acre federal park for a decade.

A 20x multiple is pretty high too.

> reality people like Musk probably would never spend even 1/100 of their wealth for any single attraction.

Musk spent approximately 20% of his wealth on an internet toy.

A goal of national parks should be that everyone has the opportunity to visit at least one over their lifetimes.

Or we're left with needing charity to step in and buy tickets on behalf of the needy.

There are many national parks which do not have any limitations, timed entries, or reservations. There are then also many which do have reservations, but reservations can be pretty easily obtained. There are a few which have limited resources available with massive numbers of people wanting to attend which do have these lottery issues.

Most locations run by the NPS allow people to just show up without restrictions. Everyone already does have the opportunity to visit at least one over their lifetimes.

No matter how you shuffle, auction or raffle the tickets, that doesn't increase their supply.

So by your metric, all methods fail?

If the market clearing price for tickets would be so high that poor people couldn't afford to win an auction, then in the alternative that they get lucky and win a raffle, their best course of action would be to sell the ticket on the secondary market and enjoying the money.

Unless, of course, you ban poor people from re-selling their tickets. I mean, they most likely would spend it all on booze, wouldn't they? /s

> Or we're left with needing charity to step in and buy tickets on behalf of the needy.

Give poor people money. They know best what they need.

Giving poor people money will not help the situation. How much money do you need to give to a family, that would want to have a picnic over the weekend, so that Bill Gates and Elon Musk and others, could not outbid them.

Yeah wont happen in real world. I wont assume bad faith from you, but generally speaking saying just give them money is a huge copout.

> Auctions work just fine for eg van Gogh paintings, and they have been in decidedly fixed supply since 1890.

Glad you brought that up.

Van Goh sold his paintings and owners of such paintings then sell them on auctions etc.

There are people in the art world who would argue that such paintings do belong in Museums, so that public can enjoy them. So they band together and collect money so that their local museum can afford to buy such Van Goh painting.

After such painting are displayed in Museum where anyone can view them, for a fixed price, that generally covers the upkeep.

Which is the same situation as here. there is a public park (that is by definition there to be used by the public), that sells tickets, that should cover the upkeep. But since the demand is too high, it sometimes need to raffle them.

Auctions would defeat the purpose.

And that's why Bill Gates and Elon Musk bid on and win all ebay auctions ever? Whenever a house goes for sale, they snatch it up, too. Don't they? /s

Basically, the same forces that make the paragraph above untrue, would also be at work here.

> Which is the same situation as here. there is a public park (that is by definition there to be used by the public), that sells tickets, that should cover the upkeep. But since the demand is too high, it sometimes need to raffle them.

If demand is so high, then a poor person who wins a ticket in a raffle is better off selling the ticket in the secondary market (to Bill Gates perhaps) and enjoying the money.

Naturally, you can forbid poor people from reselling their ticket to prevent that. We all know they would only use the proceeds for booze, wouldn't they? /s

> proceeds for booze, wouldn't they?

Who tf said that. nobody in this said that. you are the only one in this thread insinuating that people who disagree with your (brilliant /s) thoughts are doing so out of ulterior motives.

And sure in perfect world selling your tickets on secondary market would work.

But in our world, some already well of prick, would develop a scrapping bot, using lots of residential ip's (sometimes obtained in questionable ways), to spoil everything for the rest of us.

No need for a perfect world.

it's the world where people with money get all of the advantages, and people with less get leftovers.

I will agree, that in many cases this is close to reality we live in currently (for instance holiday destinations, private resorts, etc.). But that doesn't mean people can't fight it and occasionally win. And I would think it would be important for public parks (and other institutions) to do so.

Otherwise what is the point of public institutions. Just privatize everything.

Modest levels of redistribution gets you something like Germany or Scandinavia or the US.

You know how eg abolishing slavery or letting women vote was once politically unviable.

The scheme would be as follows. There's N levels on the ladder, with some amount of tickets allocated to each level. Bottom level is for normal people without tech augmentation; most tickets are allocated there, and aggressive bot detection is employed. You can implement a raffle there if it feels more fair. Remaining levels on the ladder are for those who want a chance to get ahead with automation. Apply Elo or whatever chess players or Overwatch uses to make sure people compete at their level of sophistication. This would reward and incentivize individuals learning useful life skills, while making selling the tools less useful.

Of course I can think of 10 reasons why this wouldn't work in practice, but hey, I never heard anyone even considering this idea before, so maybe it can be rescued somehow.

In the Northeast you do see some spots getting a little crowded but it's absolutely nothing like the tourism-industrial complex that are the big western national parks. Acadia is about as bad as it gets here, but mostly it looks like "theres a lot of folks here." Yellowstone is a mess of badly driven RVs, yahoos ripping around on rented side-by-sides, just a lot of really ugly concentrated MURCA.

Acadia is about all there is in the northeast, in terms of National Parks.

The positive side is that there's a ton of wilderness in the northeast that doesn't suffer from the National Park marketing badge (and thus any draw from the rest of the country), and so are less insane. Even so, some of the state parks within a reasonable trip of NYC (notably Harriman/Bear Mountain) can get a bit crazy.

The issue for locals wasn't so much crowding as I recall but concerns about restrictions to traditional sporting uses of the land. I haven't really followed how all that played out.

I've paddled through the "waters" bit a few times (geez, 20 years ago); lack of access would definitely help the overcrowding.

I haven't been up there yet. Soon. But like a lot of Maine lands in that general area, it's probably more paddling/fishing oriented than hiking (at least if you're into summits). (Even a lot of Baxter other than Katahdin is like that.)

I went to look up hikes in Shenandoah since this sounds like it could be part of a nice road trip with my family, and ironically I found that the most popular trailhead requires getting tickets through recreation.gov: https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/faqs-oldrag.htm

So perhaps the problem is spreading?

Luckily it seems it's not nearly at "The Wave" levels of scarcity, you can actually get tickets on most days: https://www.recreation.gov/ticket/10088450/ticket/10088451

The remained of the park, and all the surrounding areas, are first-come, either free or with minimal permit/entrance fees.

Backpacking permits are significantly more common but except for the extreme cases as are mentioned in the article are fairly easy to come by--except maybe at the most extreme times--and are commonly free (except for maybe parking).

The problem is peak seasons. If you show up to Yellowstone without a reservation on the 4th of July weekend, you'll be lucky if you can even get into the park, much less stay there or appreciate its natural beauty.

So if you want to visit a park during a holiday, school vacation week, or most of the Summer, you need to deal with the bloated mess of a ticketing system which was created by the cheapest new grads that the lowest-bidding rent-seeking leech of a contractor could come up with.

My advice: get used to cold weather and visit in the off season. Nobody is making reservations to hike in Bryce Canyon in the middle of December.

In general, I agree about trying to go to parks off peak season (and getting away from the more popular trails). That said, your hiking and other options can be a lot more limited at many parks that get a lot of snow in the winter relative to other seasons even if you have winter gear. (I've been to Bryce in the winter and it was hard to follow a trail in the canyon.)

BAH is a scourge and absolutely a problem though.

    I’ve personally seen trails being eroded over years, it stinks, and more people on those trails cause more erosion.

    most popular Instagramable view

(Give poor people money, if you think they need the help. No need to decide for them what is best for them by giving them help in the form of tickets.)

And if you are doing a raffle for park tickets, you are not deciding to "help them in the form of tickets" for them. They signed up for the tickets. They want to go to the park. Is it a bad idea to allow poor people that want to access a park to have a chance of doing so?

And auctions are a way of optimizing pricing of stuff. But not everything in life is about money. For instance, organ donation recipients. Do you think an auction system for organs would be a better world than the existing systems? Should we just give the poor people that wouldn't be able to afford an auction for an organ some money, and then let them die?

I don't understand. It seems like you are suggesting mixing up your welfare system with your park system?

I suggest: have one system that gives poor people money. And have another different system to run the parks.

> Do you think an auction system for organs would be a better world than the existing systems?

Yes, vastly superior. Thanks for bringing this up.

See eg https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/06/the_fungible_ki.htm... ro https://www.econtalk.org/tina-rosenberg-on-the-kidney-market... or https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2012/SheltonMcKenzi... or https://www.econlib.org/archives/2003/03/organ_transplan.htm...

Poor people weren't going to enter a lottery for the chance to visit a park anyway. At least this plan gives all the money to the park.

I really don’t understand where your claim that poor people wouldn’t enter the lottery is coming from. That seems like a nonsensical conclusion to me.

To me a lottery seems like the perfect solution, it‘s just that some of the current implementation details suck.

The fee to enter should be quite low, its only function to reduce gambling the system (besides having policies in place that also do that). It should not be possible to enter multiple times.

The service provider of the lottery should not be paid proportional or in relation to how many people enter the lottery. At least not in any kind of directly coupled way. All income from the lottery should first go to the parks and then they pay the service provider from that income.

And that‘s the problem solved.

Lotteries are fair, at least if you can’t enter multiple times and if the chance of getting a permit is still somewhat decent.

What makes you think that the auction price would go up to $100?

Assuming they sell raffle tickets to all comers, but they have a limited, fixed number of winners per day that gain entry; then I would assume that world where a $10 ticket give you a 50% chance of entry is a world where the auction clearing price would be roughly $20.

The kind of lottery you describe (where you can enter multiple times) is basically equivalent to an auction. Just more complicated and less predictable.

What? Poor people like to take vacations also and national parks were traditionally a rather cheap way to do so.

Theres also a lot of poor folks who's purpose in life is literally visiting those parks. Recreation.gov owns big wall climbing permits for Yosemite for instance and a significant number of young dirt bag climbers that live in their cars in order to climb full time and are very definitely poor apply for those every year.

I think they should do half the tickets by lottery, half by auction. Lottery tickets should require ID and/or photo upload when you enter to prevent reselling. The lottery/auction operator should get a percentage of the total money, with the park service keeping most of it.

If you give poor people money so every can equally bid on the auction, then why not just make it a lottery and not bother giving poor people money they’ll just give back through auction?

Instead of restricting them ad hoc to eg national park entries or whatever you think should be provided in-kind by raffles.

https://www.gov.ca.gov/contact/

https://www.nps.gov/articles/leave-no-trace-seven-principles...

What you're describing isn't just "this is public land. Enjoy"

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.

I'm not sure this is true. The United States has a huge amount of wilderness and federal land. The problem is that most people want to go to a small number of very popular places.

Allowing as many people as possible to have a nice time in nature, whether by providing facilities, informing potential visitors of their options, managing access to popular or vulnerable sites, etc, is exactly what the Bureau of Land Management are supposed to do. The fact that there is a single agency in control means that it's not really an example of the tragedy of the commons, either.

That is because they are the prettiest and most desirable destinations. This is unsurprising. People want to see Yosemite, not some barren nothingness out near Ridgecrest, CA or Kingman, AZ.

Just because land is owned by the USFS or BLM and has public access doesn't mean it has any real recreational or attractive value that would draw visitors.

The counterparts to this are that a) many people would rather go somewhere slightly less attractive that isn't overcrowded and b) lots of people are attracted, at least in part, by going somewhere novel.

The fact that there is a certain challenge involved in getting as many people as possible (but no more) to the prettiest sites while finding less pretty but still enjoyable alternatives to those who can't make it is exactly why land management and tourism agencies exist.

Here in Germany, the Königssee waterfall had to be completely closed for at least five years to give nature a chance to rebuild, after Instagram users caused enormous devastation [1] - trash, fires, noise scaring wildlife including some species of rare, protected birds, 3km worth of trails through the bushes, erosion caused by the trails... and it's by far not the only place.

[1] https://www.ksta.de/panorama/wasserfall-hotspot-am-koenigsse...

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?

This is extremely novel to me, being from Houston, and I definitely want to try it now.

[1] good writeup from the same authors https://doingmiles.com/techniques-stealth/

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.)

It's actually the entire subject of TFA.

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.

It goes to Booz Allen Hamilton.

Booz are effectively stealing insane amounts of taxpayer dollars to run an extremely simple CRUD website. And no, it's not "actually complex and just looks like CRUD". It's really just CRUD built on AWS services.

IMO? If the grift cannot be killed then Access Fund should team up with the open beta guy and submit an insanely competitive bid when the contract comes up.

And all of these different permit systems trigger different forms, agreements, vehicle information collection, etc. once you move to the checkout stage. It truly is a massively complex system - if not technically, then logistically, by the sheer quantity of requirements-gathering and accommodation of hundreds of different individual land management agencies' unique systems for managing user access. I've read some of the source code for the web client (last I checked, they were still publishing source maps to prod) and it's a pretty impressive feat that it works and holds together as well as it does.

As you can tell from my comment above, I'm just as incensed about the business model as you are. It is highway robbery. Taxpayers subsidized the creation of the site, and now we're being doubly ripped off as a huge portion of the profits collected are being funneled straight back into the pockets of Booz Allen (and, no doubt, also being channeled into lobbying efforts designed to maintain this monopoly through the renewal process for the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act this October).

However, I don't think that unfairly diminishing the technical and organizational achievement the site represents is going to help with trying to find a solution to the economic grift that it also represents.

Are you guessing here? I don't really know what you mean by the JSON response (from who to who?).

I tried to look into whether recreation.gov has per-agency or even more granular schemas. I found a manual to the Recreation.gov agency portal that suggests the answer. Note that even though it's hosted on the usfs site it has no usfs-specific branding. The section "Adding New Inventory to Recreation.gov" doesn't describe any agency-specific options explicitly, though it does have vague manual processes that could in theory involve custom development.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprd380615...

    https://www.recreation.gov/api/camps/availability/campground/{id}/month?start_date={date}

USFS (Idaho): https://www.recreation.gov/api/camps/availability/campground...

  {
    "{id}": {
      "availabilities": {
        "{date}": "Available",
      },
      "campsite_id": "63045",
      "campsite_reserve_type": "Site-Specific",
      "campsite_rules": null,
      "campsite_type": "STANDARD NONELECTRIC",
      "capacity_rating": "Single",
      "loop": "LOWER",
      "max_num_people": 8,
      "min_num_people": 1,
      "quantities": {
        "{date}": 1,
      },
      "site": "012",
      "supplemental_camping": null,
      "type_of_use": "Overnight"
    }
  }

  {
    "10161360": {
      "availabilities": {
        "{date}": "Not Reservable",
      },
      "campsite_id": "10161360",
      "campsite_reserve_type": "Site-Specific",
      "campsite_rules": null,
      "campsite_type": "STANDARD NONELECTRIC",
      "capacity_rating": "",
      "loop": "One",
      "max_num_people": 8,
      "min_num_people": 1,
      "quantities": {
        "date": 1,
      },
      "site": "Site 1",
      "supplemental_camping": null,
      "type_of_use": "Overnight"
    }
  }

This is of course just one example. There are a ton of other JSON requests in the flow of reserving one of these specific campsites, and then there are all sorts of other processes like backpacking permits.

In my personal experience I've seen two backpacking permit reservation system styles. There's one that looks like it was shoehorned into the campsite reservation model, and another where it looks like the agency gets to define a bunch of free text fields and then has a human manually review and enter into a system.

In general I get the vibe from recreation.gov that whenever there's complicated logic there's a human in the background doing the actual work. I base this on the amount of free text inputs and the fact some actions take hours to weeks.

That's it for me looking into this, but if you post an example of what you're talking about I'd be interested.

Fair enough. But this complexity doesn't scale with the number of applications submitted.

But there, as well as here, the actually difficult problems involve all the dumb, complicated business logic.

> It goes to Booz Allen Hamilton.

Article says this in the 4th sentence.

"Of the $9 [lottery fee], $5 ultimately goes to Booz Allen and $4 goes to the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the site, a BLM spokesman said."

https://backpackinglight.com/forums/topic/recreation-gov-mak...

More context on public vs privately run web service: https://backpackinglight.com/forums/topic/recreation-gov-mak...

This is like when that new gelato place opens up and has a 45 minute line for $15 ice cream, and the regular ice cream place is basically as good and has normal prices and no line.

First you pay to participate in the lottery. This is money you've lost no matter what.

Then if you win you pay a second amount for the permit itself.

On the private land side, more and more landowners are leasing their land for hunting. I'm in the rural midwest - not long ago you could hunt on just about any private property simply by walking up to the person's front door and asking nicely. Nowadays more and more properties are leased out and under strict contracts that limit access. In my area many contracts limit foot traffic, not just hunting.

Luckily my family owns land, and we let neighbors on it, but this is becoming more and more outlier philosophy. I totally get it all and understand it from an economic point of view, but it doesn't make it suck any less.

On the public side however, this just doesn't sit right with me. There must be a different solution.

The fact is, demand for these spots are too high. I'd rather see an auction, but that'd be too unfair for people who aren't rich enough - public goods are still public and should be available.

It made sense to me, as I was under the impression that the money went directly to the park. But the fact that it goes to a middleman changes things.

I mean, I get it, I understand that they need to limit the amount of people visiting certain sensitive ecosystems, but still... something about this just seems fundamentally wrong to me. Access to the great outdoors, to nature, seems like such a fundamental human right to me.

No it wouldn't.

Imagine MrBeast’s “I bought the entire national park for the next century” video. You want people to always have a chance to go, no matter the demand.

Everyone wants ultimate freedom then complains when they show up and everyone else with ultimate freedom has trashed the place.

The general public has a huge credibility problem of its own to grapple with, but somehow it’s always someone else’s job to sit and reflect, find the solution.

And, at the local (say town) level that's probably true. So what happens is they farm it out to an existing service for "free" and the service tacks on a fee. As a result, I either write a physical check or have my bank do so for town fees because if I paid directly online I'd pay a surcharge.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I guess I don't understand why Booz Allen Hamilton is able to employ contractors for this work but the USDS is not. Is this truly the cost of building and running such a website (i.e. 2-3mm/yr according to this website)?

Also, it is very difficult to lay-off public employees if their role becomes unnecessary in the future.

Hiring indirectly via a contracted intermediary largely solves both of these problems.

Sadly, it's not unique. Many charities and whatnot also end up trading their good name, to enrich corporations. My mother used to run a nonprofit, and told me about it. In her case, I think they only made about 5% of the proceeds, and were happy about it.

The "Trade on a nonprofit's name, and make money" model is quite old (My mother's org was doing it 30 years ago).

https://KOA.com/campgrounds

Sites like Hipcamp help people market their private campgrounds online. Lots of private places listed here.

https://www.hipcamp.com

On top of that, sometimes state parks/campgrounds can actually be just leased private land.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/02/15/fairfield-lake-texas...

if anybody is interested in another park, i can make one for you.