As national parks face overcrowding, Acadia chief says new reservation system working well
File photo / Laurie Schreiber
Cadillac Mountain is one of Acadia National Park’s most popular spots. It’s seen here in a pre-pandemic year.
Visiting the summit of Cadillac Mountain — one of Acadia National Park’s most popular spots — has become a more pleasant experience since a vehicle reservation system was instituted in May, the park’s superintendent, Kevin Schneider, told the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on National Parks during a hearing Wednesday.
“We’re very pleased with how the vehicle reservation system is going on Cadillac this summer,” he said.
The hearing was convened by the subcommittee’s chair, U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, to examine the effects of overcrowding in many national parks across the country.
"We can accidentally love our parks to death," King said Wednesday.
Acadia, which covers 47,000 acres primarily on Mount Desert Island and is one of the country's most visited national parks, may hold some lessons for its peers.
The reservation system is part of a transportation plan developed over recent years by the National Park Service to mitigate traffic congestion caused by Acadia’s rising popularity, Schneider told the subcommittee.
The plan, created with input from local residents and businesses, also expands park-and-ride locations so people can easily use the free Island Explorer bus system that traverses the park and surrounding communities. Other components include expanding the Explorer routes and inviting commercial concessions to operate small touring vehicles.
“We’re trying to take a comprehensive approach by using a range of actions,” Schneider said.
The park piloted the reservation system for 21 days last October. Vehicle reservations are required for the Cadillac Summit Road from May 26 through Oct. 19.
Schneider said he was atop Cadillac when the system began operation in May to see how it was going.
“A visitor came up to me and said he’d been there the week prior to see the sun rise, and he said it was a complete mess — there were cars everywhere,” he related. “He said, ‘This is so much better.’”
The park is hearing similar sentiments from online visitor reviews, he added.
Cadillac’s summit has about 150 parking spaces. Before the system, it wasn’t unusual to have 500 cars up there on a summer’s day, he said.
Acadia is getting word out about the reservation system through social media, websites, visitors centers, signage and partner organizations. The park printed 200,000 rack cards and distributed them to lodgings, welcome and visitor centers, and local chambers of commerce, he said.
In his opening remarks, King said many national parks are having a record-breaking year.
“Even as international visitation is down due to ongoing COVID-19 concerns, visitation numbers at our most iconic parks like Glacier, Acadia and Yosemite are already at all-time highs,” he said.
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