29 Jun 2003 Public Access to Yosemite National Park
Bonner Cohen, who just joined the National Center as a senior fellow after leaving the Lexington Institute, has a new piece on our website discussing the National Park Service’s Yosemite Plan. It seems the Park Service wants to spend $442 million making Yosemite more difficult to visit for people who have small children or don’t make a lot of money.
The goal, of course, is to make this popular park less popular. To be fair, the Park Service probably has nothing against families or lower-income people, but if you make visitors tote strollers on buses and eliminate 60 percent of the campsites that are accessible by car (but leave in place the more expensive hotel housing), you are bound to end up with older, richer visitors.
We could call it the graying — or the whiting? — of the National Park Service. The NPR crowd will be overrepresented.