Modeling the Effects of Shuttle Service on Transportation System Performance and Quality of Visitor Experience in Rocky Mountain National Park

Abstract

Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) was one of the first national parks to adopt an alternative transportation system: a shuttle bus system initiated in 1978. To address parking lot shortages while accommodating growing numbers of park visitors, RMNP expanded its shuttle bus service in 2001. Although the expanded shuttle service has helped to alleviate parking congestion at popular trailheads, expansion may also be enabling levels of visitation that cause or exacerbate visitor crowding. Thus, there is a need to evaluate and potentially refine RMNP's shuttle service according to the amount of visitor use that can be accommodated at popular destinations in the park without unacceptable effects on the quality of visitors’ experiences. This study evaluated and quantified transportation system performance and visitor crowding at popular recreation sites in the Bear Lake Road corridor resulting from RMNP's shuttle service operations. The study used integrated transportation and visitor use modeling to provide quantitative estimates of the extent of parking congestion, transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, transit operating costs per passenger, and visitor crowding associated with existing and alternative transit service operations scenarios. The National Park Service will use information from the study to refine the operation of shuttle service in RMNP in a manner that both optimizes transportation system performance and protects the quality of visitors’ experiences. Further, the study framework can be generalized to other public lands units to design and operate transit service in accordance with transportation, resource, and visitor experience objectives.

Values of Travel Time for Recreational Trips under Different Behavioural Rules

“…For this reason, alternative specific figures are obtained also for the RUM model. For the hybrid RUM-RRM model, both Chorus and Dekker WTP measures (see Section 2.1) are obtained considering marginal effects defined as in Equations ( 10) and (11). Since travel time is measured in minutes and travel cost in euro cents, figures obtained are multiplied by 0.6 in order to transform the value of time units into euros/hour.…”

“…[3][4][5][6]. Other examples of transport practices in natural sites are Denali (USA) [7][8][9], Rocky Mountains (USA, Canada) [10][11][12][13], Acadia (USA, Canada) [14][15][16] and Zion (USA) [14,17].…”

Planning for an Aging Fleet of Shuttle Vehicles with Simulation

“…They look at the impact of varying the mean interdispatch time and number of buses used between two pilgrimage sites on the total time required to evacuate the starting site. In a more recent study of a fixed-route system, Lawson et al (2011) use simulation to evaluate and possibly improve Rocky Mountain National Park's shuttle service. They examine both the transit system's performance (as measured, e.g., by operating cost per passenger) and the quality of visitor's experience (as measured by people per viewscape at specific sites), and how performance might change if larger proportions of visitors could be persuaded to use the park's shuttle system rather than driving to major destinations.…”

Pavement treatment type influences visitor experiences related to vehicular road sound in Death Valley National Park

“…Mass transportation systems are particularly common approach in the NPS with 16% of all units having some form of mass transportation (Davis, 2016). However, mass transit systems and restrictions on visitor use are not feasible or desirable in all parks due to considerations like increasing visitor use due to better access (via shuttles) and infringing on visitor values of parks (Lawson et al, 2011;Manning, 2003;Manning, 2011).…”