A map to explore proposed changes to park entry fees
By: Casey Miller
Entry fees to national parks may soon see a sharp increase. In an effort to finance a backlog of repairs and improvements to parks, the National Parks Service recently proposed fee increases for 17 of the most visited national parks. The service is considering increases for both peak season and regular season pricing.
For some parks this increase is negligible, but for others, fares could more than double. To better understand the impact on park visitors, I created a map highlighting each affected park. Try using the map to understand the potential cost of your next trip; explore the fee hikes based on season and entry method to the park (motorcycle, bike, personal car, or by foot).
The NPS proposed these fee increases to generate revenue for overdue repairs to park infrastructure and to make improvements to the parks. The service estimates that this fee structure could increase revenue by 34 percent, bringing the total potential revenue to $270 million compared to the $200 million collected in 2016.
While it will remain free to enter these parks if you are under 16 years of age, or if you hold a Senior, Military, Access, or Volunteer pass, park-goers should expect to see peak season fees roughly double what they would pay now.
That said, this only affects 17 of the 118 national park sites currently charging entrance fees. The remaining 299 free parks will not be affected.
Behind the design
To build this map I altered our outdoors style, lightening the shade of green used in shading the national parks and increasing the opacity of contour lines starting at a zoom level of six, rather than 11. This makes the national park boundary overlays pop a bit more against the background and also emphasizes the topography in the parks.
The data for the national park boundaries comes directly from the National Park Service, downloadable as a shapefile that I then converted to GeoJSON using ogr2ogr; I filtered it to only include the affected parks. After converting and filtering this park data, I added it as a layer in my GL JS map.
Have an opinion on the proposed price increases? The NPS is taking public comments from now through November 23, 2017. Head to their forum to submit your thoughts, then try creating your own interactive map using GL JS.
Casey Miller (@caseymmiller) | Twitter
The cost of National Parks was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.