The more than 4 million visitors who cram into Yosemite Valley each year are dangerously close to loving the park to death.
Earlier last week, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt announced a draft management plan that would cut car traffic and restore some 180 acres to natural conditions. The plan envisions building three satellite parking lots outside the valley and encouraging day visitors to take buses. It also proposes ripping out a dam and three bridges on the Merced River to return the natural flow, demolishing the Superintendent's House, commercial stables and other park service structures.
Environmentalists complain it doesn't go far enough, noting that combining tourism with natural preservation works at cross purposes. The fact of the matter is, no management plan will please all. Babbitt's plan appears to strike a reasonable compromise between protecting the park and permitting visitors to enjoy it. Refinements to the plan are still possible in the public hearing process.
Babbitt's plan recognizes that there is great demand to visit Yosemite. Absent a mechanism to control car traffic in the spectacular park, which encompasses some 1,200 square miles of scenic wild lands, park goers can expect more of the same — summer weekends with more than 7,000 cars jammed onto the narrow foot of the Yosemite Valley.
Because 80 percent of the park's visitors come for a single-day visit and 90 percent of them drive cars, visits often occur en masse. Horn-honking traffic jams mightily detract from Yosemite's alpine wildernesses, groves of giant Sequoia trees and the glacially carved Yosemite valley with its waterfalls, cliffs and unusual rock formations.
Shuttle buses will enable visitors to continue to enjoy the park while minimizing headaches over finding a place to park and curbing automobile impact in the valley. The plan envisions three new parking lots outside park boundaries with 1,600 parking spaces.
Surely, a shuttle system is preferable to other management proposals that have surfaced from time to time, such as park pass lotteries and long-range reservation systems. The Babbitt plan aims to restore and protect the scenic wonders yet permit reasonable access to visitors who are anxious to commune with nature.
Traffic jams in Yosemite are a 20-year old problem. This management plan appears to be a thoughtful way of dealing with that problem while restoring the natural beauty of the park and its waterways. Opponents should not dismiss it out of hand. Instead, they should work to improve it during the public hearing process in April.