Over spring break this past year, I was able to visit Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Attracting over 14 million visitors a year (being the most visited national park), I thought visiting in the "off-season" would allow for ample exploration, while allowing limited encounters with other visitors. Researching online, it was claimed that there was an entrance fee of $35. However, the park has no entrance stations, and does not require parking permits, allowing for mass visitation at essentially no cost to the individual. On the descent from Mount LeConte, the effect of this absence of fees became visible, as we encountered many other visitors and the litter they left behind.
Parks with high visitation also tend to experience associated negative externalities. Littering and general wear-and-tear to trails and roads show that through mass consumption of this park, a negative externality in consumption is generated. While individuals benefit (PMB) through visiting the park, the overall benefit (SMB) is reduced due to the negative effects of this mass visitation (SMB < PMB) . Without collecting entrance fees, the park has no efficient way to self-combat these drawbacks. This is likely why the park is now establishing an actual fee system in order to help pay for the wear-and-tear the park experiences, internalizing these negative externalities: those that visit the park now take into account the associated effects of their visitation through monetary compensation. The National Park system prides itself on the preservation of natural beauty while also making it available to the public. This is a difficult game to play due to externalities present, and will likely require more tweaking of these fees in years to come to more effectively reduce this market failure.
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Exclusion and the Timed Entry Pass
Just before school began for the year, I had the great pleasure of visiting Rocky Mountain National Park and summiting my first 13,000ft peak (Mt. Flattop). Though it attracts about a third as many visitors as Great Smoky Mountain, my friends and I traversed the park in the height of its busiest season; though it would have been more peaceful if the park had been emptier, we did not encounter any real problems with litter or overcrowding. Rocky Mountain National Park established the same system you referred to a few years back, one of timed entry passes, to attempt to combat the negative consumption externalities of overcrowding. This system charges the consumer $2 to purchase a pass that grants entry to that park during a 2 hour window, though the consumer may remain in the park as long as they choose.
I’d like to draw attention to the concept of non-exclusion and what it means to be prohibitively costly – namely, that a public good can be prohibitively costly for reasons other than price. It seems to me that prohibitive costs to visiting a national park would be comprised of mainly time and transportation costs, rather than the cost of entry. The timed entry passes appear to introduce another time cost which would doubly punish the surgeon or single mother whose time is more valuable than their two dollars. I’d venture to say that the price of the entry ticket (to a certain extent) has little impact on the quantity of consumers at a National Park, since time and transportation costs significantly exceed pass costs, and that the price could be raised to deal with negative consumption externalities without affecting visitation. The new pass system moves Q* towards QAE in a way that shields the decision from criticisms of price-based exclusion, but harms the family that cannot justify traveling a day sooner to make their timed-entry window, which tends to be early in the morning. I’d love to see a paper reflect on a broader definition of prohibitive costs, so that we can better explore the idea of exclusion from public goods.
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