Two decades ago, Jan Brown experienced Greater Yellowstone’s automobile dependence first-hand. The year was 2003, and Brown had just begun directing the Yellowstone Business Partnership, a nonprofit association of 200 environmentally friendly businesses. She was driving all over the 27 counties that make up the region to engage with member businesses and recruit new ones.
“In the process,” she told me, “I recognized the need for greater mobility and more affordable public transportation to serve youth, seniors, park employees, and both domestic and foreign visitors — particularly in the winter months when many should not be behind the wheel.”
The businesses she served saw it too: Hundreds of thousands of individual automotive trips among far-flung locations burned a lot of fossil fuel. The unsustainable system also led to car crashes, traffic congestion and roadkill.
YBP offered its members a series of trainings on how to profit from sustainability — for example, how to cut costs by reconfiguring waste streams or carbon-intensive operations. Basil Barna, a trained physicist who had been researching transportation systems at the Idaho National Laboratory, led some of the most popular trainings: on transport and energy.
In 2008, Brown and Barna convinced the Idaho Transportation Department to fund a study exploring an integrated regional transport system for Greater Yellowstone. This system, in industry jargon, would be “multi-modal.” As opposed to the one-person-one-vehicle approach, it would integrate multiple modes of transportation: automobiles as well as planes, buses, bikes and walking trails.
“We were hoping something would work; I personally believed that congestion was one of the biggest problems in Yellowstone.”
dan wenk, superintendent, yellowstone national park, 2011-2018
Greater Yellowstone had local public transit systems at the time. Southern Teton Area Rapid Transit, or START, was founded in 1987 and run by the town of Jackson, Wyoming, with long-term financial support from local businesses, plus county, state and federal governments. Streamline in Bozeman, Montana, and Skyline just south in Big Sky had both begun in 2006. Having worked on both, David Kack of the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University said in an interview that although they then had flaws, “both were examples of what Theodore Roosevelt said: ‘Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.’”
Barna’s 2008 study expanded that vision dramatically. He took its results on the road. Support flowed from YBP businesses, he told me, but less so from several gateway communities, the states of Wyoming and Montana, or the national parks of Yellowstone or Grand Teton.
“Transit is so hard to get started,” Barna said. Ridership never grows quickly. “You need funding support until enough people begin choosing transit over driving because it’s more enjoyable.” Yet the structure of society makes that funding hard to lock in. “The way our national transportation system works is that car owners bear the vast majority of the costs of their mobility,” he said. “National parks and state and local governments are reluctant to shift some of those costs to their bottom lines.” He was discouraged, but not surprised, that regional entities wouldn’t pay for this system.
Then Brown found a new funding option.
The rise of sustainable demand
In the early 2000s, Peter Christ recalled in a recent interview, there had been a divide between environmentalists and the business community. Many environmental advocates of the time, for example, wanted to restrict snowmobile use in Yellowstone. Although some businesses would profit from increased snowmobiling, Christ was puzzled that the divide was portrayed as monolithic. “The so-called ‘business voice’ said, ‘Open the doors and let them in,’” he recalled. “Yet I was part of the business community, and this wasn’t me.”
Christ was then a young restaurateur in Red Lodge, Montana. He saw his business as inherently linked to the environment: both his customers and his employees valued Greater Yellowstone’s natural conditions. Both the fate of his business and his personal happiness were tied to the region’s ecological health.
“If my business causes a decline in the resource,” Christ recalled thinking, “for me as a businessperson, that doesn’t make sense.” Conservationists were then arguing that stewarding natural resources was better for the economy than exploiting those resources. But Christ was especially impressed, at YBP organizing sessions, to meet businesspeople making those same arguments — whether their businesses were in tourism, ranching or even mining. Christ signed up as YBP’s founding board chair.
In 2003, Christ hired Brown as the organization’s executive director. “She really brought clarity to our strategic plan,” he said. Part of that plan centered on broad questions of sustainability. “A changing climate would impact Yellowstone,” Christ recalled learning, “and transportation was a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions … So transportation became part of our mission.”
YBP members didn’t want it to be a typical environmental advocacy organization. As businesspeople, they wanted to act. One way that played out: rather than lobbying the government to do something about regional transportation, they wanted to set up a cooperative to enact the elements of Barna’s study themselves. So they did.
“Like a professional society or a manufacturing association, the co-op was an assembly of competitors,” said David Stauffer, a Red Lodge business writer who served as YBP board chair during the co-op launch. “You can’t use a co-op for restraint of trade, so there were never any price discussions. But for promoting transit, it was a great vehicle, so to speak.”
“A changing climate would impact Yellowstone, and transportation was a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions … So transportation became part of our mission.”
Peter christ, founding board chair, Yellowstone Business Partnership
The cooperative, called Linx, linked together Greater Yellowstone’s various transport operations, including START, Streamline and Skyline, plus longer-distance bus systems such as Karst Stages of Bozeman and Salt Lake Express of Rexburg, Idaho. Linx would help passengers gain a seamless experience across multiple transportation providers in the region. It would thus bring those providers increased business.
In other words, Linx wasn’t a startup seeking to compete with existing businesses, nor a governmental agency seeking to tell them what to do. Instead it was a co-op owned by its members — especially the providers themselves.
It was unusual to apply the co-op structure to transportation. Nationwide, the few examples were designed to meet the specific needs of dispersed school bus riders, low-income employees, or senior citizens. But Greater Yellowstone was an unusual case because it had so many disparate interests, which a co-op could unite. If transit were run solely by a national park, or another agency, or a gateway community, or a state, or a long-distance bus company, or some other body, it would be too self-interested. To achieve the most effective transportation system, Linx designed systemwide governance.
“It’s a win for all of the transportation providers in this area,” Kathy Pope, sales manager for Salt Lake Express, told the Idaho Falls Post Register in 2009. Regional supply and demand existed, she believed. For any single business, it might be too daunting to coordinate across three states, two national parks and dozens of municipal and county governments. But if a co-op could be jump-started with some external funding, it just might become sustainable.
Congestion in national parks
Almost anyone who drives in Yellowstone today experiences automobile-based congestion. Traffic gets stuck in bison jams. It’s hard to make a left turn. Parking lots are full and you have to wait for a spot.
Although complaints have grown with the tourism boom of the last 20 years, congestion has bedeviled Yellowstone through much of its history. In a 1953 Harper’s Magazine article, “Let’s Close the National Parks,” Bernard DeVoto noted that Yellowstone visitors complained of overcrowding, poor service, traffic and interminable lines for toilets and picnic tables. DeVoto’s article helped pressure Congress to increase budgets across the park system.
Managing crowds is a function inherent in Yellowstone’s founding legislation, which calls for the place to be a “public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Given Yellowstone’s geographic scale, that means managing the means of transport. Indeed, the park’s very first requests for appropriations, in 1873, were to build roads.
Today, complaints about congestion can come in at least three different flavors. First is overcrowding at bathrooms or visitor centers or the benches from which to view eruptions of the Old Faithful geyser. This was DeVoto’s chief concern, but with $645 million in infrastructure investments since 2020, Yellowstone today rates overwhelmingly positive results in visitor use surveys.
Second is excess demand for hotel rooms and summer campsites. On this issue, expansions of the physical plant have not met demand and rationing has been pretty well accepted. If you don’t have a reservation, you can’t stay overnight inside park boundaries.
Third is automobile-based congestion. Traffic issues can erupt along hundreds of miles of remote, high-elevation, wildlife-drenched two-lane roads. This form of congestion is easy to see but hard to solve: It’s neither practicable nor desirable to expand by adding lanes to the roads. But it’s also hard to get people out of their cars.
The problem exists at many national parks, and some address it with transit systems. Some of the biggest systems, at the Statue of Liberty and Alcatraz, serve islands not accessible by automobile. Others, such as Zion, operate buses on roads closed to private vehicles. At Yosemite’s central valley and the south rim of the Grand Canyon, where buses mostly share roads with cars, the major incentive for visitors to take public transit is that, in their cars, they have trouble finding parking.
Few park transit systems are integrated with regional multimodal operations. In a 2024 inventory of 96 transit systems across 58 national parks, only six parks had partnerships with local transit agencies. Of them, only Sequoia/Kings Canyon was a classic Western mountain park, and its external shuttle went to only one town, Visalia.
During the Linx launch, Dave Stauffer, the YBP board chair, found the best template for Linx would be Acadia National Park’s Island Explorer bus system. It does integrate with the nearby towns of Bar Harbor and Bangor, Maine, including connections to an airport and ferry/ship docks.
The key to its success, Stauffer learned, was broad support. Island Explorer is operated by the nonprofit Downeast Transportation, which is funded by six municipalities, state and federal agencies, the park advocacy group Friends of Acadia, and businesses including L.L. Bean. “It was a simpler geography, not as complex or high-volume as Yellowstone,” Stauffer said in an interview. “But the people I spoke to were very encouraging.”
Public transit innovations
In parks such as Zion and Yosemite, park-led initiatives in the past 25 years have addressed in-park congestion. Linx had a different vision: a business-led initiative to address regional sustainability. In the same way that ecologists had come to understand how Yellowstone’s wild animals were part of an ecosystem that spanned Greater Yellowstone, Linx saw how Yellowstone’s human ecology spanned people, businesses, destinations and transportation options well beyond park boundaries.
“This could be a very interesting national experiment,” Brown, as director of YBP, told the Post-Register in 2009. “We could be proving out something that will work in rural areas across the nation.”
That innovation proved central to Brown’s creative fundraising. YBP received more than $500,000 for Linx from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the stimulus bill that followed the 2008 recession.
The profound innovation was what today is called mobility-as-a-service. “We’re so focused on owning a vehicle,” said David Kack of WTI. “But what if we instead asked our transportation systems to provide access to mobility in different ways?” Thus a single app could let you plan, choose and pay for your train, bus, Uber or Lyft, taxi, bike-share, scooter, or other way to get to your destination. Advocates call mobility-as-a-service, which is especially popular in Europe, the “future of transportation.”
In 2010, however, that was a distant future. Apps weren’t yet common. Uber had barely been founded; bicycle- and scooter-sharing programs didn’t exist. Indeed, no technology had yet been designed to power online trip planning with central ticketing. In 2010, Linx spent much of the federal grant building a feasibility study, developing a website and its supporting technologies, as well as the coordination protocols among providers required to make it work.
Then came the operational innovation. Although Linx was designed to connect regional transport systems, it also had to fill a giant hole in the middle: No public transportation had ever existed inside Yellowstone National Park. There were plenty of private tours — today, hundreds of companies are licensed to provide various types of guided services — but no scheduled buses to transport members of the public.
Thus, Linx’s greatest legacy came in the pilot bus programs it ran inside the park from 2011 to 2013.
Losing money
For seven weeks in the summer of 2011, Linx buses ran 1,086 miles every day. They centered on the south half of Yellowstone’s Grand Loop road system, almost 100 miles connecting Old Faithful, Lake, Canyon, Norris and Madison. But the buses, operated by providers such as Karst Stages and Salt Lake Express, also connected to West Yellowstone; Colter Bay, in Grand Teton National Park; Pahaska Tepee, outside the East Entrance; and Gardiner, outside the North Entrance. These external destinations provided the links, such as to Karst’s regularly scheduled buses from West Yellowstone to Bozeman.
That first summer, Linx had just three vehicles patrolling these vast distances, so it wasn’t the sort of every-15-minutes experience that most public transit riders need. Nor was a $25 standard day pass a typical transit experience — although numerous discounts kept the price for many riders closer to $5. The season’s boardings totaled 754, or an average of just 15 per day. Revenues totaled $10,543, against expenses of $148,854. But as a pilot project, the effort accomplished Linx’s goals.
The pilot demonstrated that the scheme’s principles held even though most of Yellowstone lacked cellphone coverage, which made communications a challenge. “Bus drivers would make a landline call from the Lake Hotel,” Brown told me. Sometimes the drivers reported being stuck in bison jams and running late. But in general, the system worked.
The partnership with the Park Service also went well. Brown was complimentary of Dan Wenk, who served as Yellowstone superintendent from 2011 to 2018. When she told Wenk’s team that the first summer had achieved Linx’s proof of concept, they agreed to continue the pilot studies.
One insight from that first summer: 45 percent of riders were employees. Each high season, more than 4,000 seasonal employees worked for the park or its concessionaires. Some — as much as 30 percent — didn’t have a personal vehicle. Although Xanterra and Delaware North, the park’s main concessionaires, provided some employee transport and field trips, employees used the bus to explore on their own.
Seeking to reduce costs, Linx’s 2012 pilot cut its mileage and routes, focusing only on the South Loop and West Yellowstone. Costs dropped by two-thirds, while boardings increased and total revenues almost tripled. But Linx still lost $23,712 out of a total $53,040 operating budget because its schedules and frequencies were still far too limited for most riders. As one TripAdvisor review said, “The service is not really very handy for touring the park which is quite large. Often, what you might want to see would be between 2 drop off points.”
In 2013, buoyed by a Wyoming Department of Transportation intercity bus grant, Linx re-expanded from its South Loop routes to add a daily round trip from Cody to Jackson, involving a transfer at the Lake Hotel. This pilot ran for the full summer’s high season from June 4 to August 23. Boardings almost tripled to 2,905; the grant helped push total revenues to $292,000. But Linx still lost $25,300, largely because it attracted fewer riders than expected.
Because most riders got on or off inside the park rather than using the full Cody-Jackson intercity service, Wyoming declined to renew the grant. Linx was done. Several stakeholders, including Brown herself, had invested in the co-op and lost money. Furthermore, YBP had shifted all of its funding and energy from its other programs to Linx. Arthur Kull, an Idaho Falls food scientist who succeeded Stauffer as YBP board chair, had the sad duty of shutting the group down.
“The organization had run its course,” founding chair Peter Christ said. “Wrangling businesspeople is tricky. But I appreciated the opportunity to work with people thirsty to find the better way, to ask, ‘If humanity will exist in this place, can we do it better?’”
Stauffer remembers being continually disappointed in Linx’s 2013 daily ridership numbers. He had hoped the buses would be filled with tourists. After all, that’s how it worked at Acadia, with a half-million annual boardings. He described that summer as a sad march toward a fated doom.
If transit were run solely by a national park, or another agency, or a gateway community, or a state, or a long-distance bus company, or some other body, it would be too self-interested.
Those involved in Linx have several explanations for its failure: It was ahead of its time. The technology wasn’t ready. They should have gotten more diverse buy-in. The varying regulations and insurance requirements across three states, plus obligations associated with various grants, were too onerous. The co-op structure may not have been appropriate. They could have used different priorities in setting the pilot routes and schedules. They could have done more, or different, marketing.
But in retrospect, a key factor was a mismatch between two admirable goals, public transit and reducing congestion. Linx had been set up around public transit issues such as sustainability and access. When Brown references its success, she talks about serving income-challenged employees and carless international visitors.
But many people wanted Linx to reduce congestion. A 2013 Bozeman Chronicle editorial talked about Linx in terms of the ever-growing numbers of automobiles in the park, saying, “Yellowstone officials might be surprised at how many visitors would take advantage of a voluntary shuttle service if it were offered there.”
Conceptually, a bus reduces automobile traffic on its route — but only one car at a time. Linx’s pilots were too small to make a dent. Even at full scale, would the system have attracted enough riders to reduce congestion?
One of the biggest problems: on Yellowstone’s two-lane roads, a bus gets stuck in a bison jam just like all the vehicles in front of it. Given the hassles of riding a bus, visitors are likely to take advantage only when it offers something more than a car. A voluntary shuttle service rarely does.
Solving congestion
“When I was superintendent, I would get calls at least once a year from people who would say, ‘You need a shuttle. I’d like to provide it,’” Dan Wenk told me in a recent interview.
“I would ask them how it would work,” Wenk continued. He would ask about the number of buses, the stops, the frequencies, the schedules, the associated maintenance facilities and parking lots. He would dig deep into operations: “If a passenger gets off at Grand Prismatic Spring, can they choose to stay anywhere from 15 minutes to three hours? If a passenger misses the last bus at Old Faithful and they can’t stay overnight because all the rooms were reserved months ago, what does that person do?”
Reflecting on those conversations, Wenk added, “I never posed these questions to discourage anybody. I was curious how it would work, what it would cost. We were hoping something would work; I personally believed that congestion was one of the biggest problems in Yellowstone. But I can say this without fear of being contradicted: Not one of those people ever called me back.”
Linx didn’t have answers to those questions, either. But it wasn’t designed around answering those questions — with its co-op structure, it was focused on the priorities of concerned businesses, regional transportation providers and transit grantmakers. Comparing Linx’s priorities to congestion reduction, Wenk said, “These are two entirely different things.”
The outcomes of this mismatch: First, the Park Service couldn’t offer Linx financial support. Yet, as Barna had predicted, it’s nearly impossible to run a transit system without long-term government support. Linx and Yellowstone were not going to follow the example of Acadia, where park entrance revenues provide 72 percent of Island Explorer’s operating expenses.
Second, Linx never really engaged with the challenges that face park leaders seeking to reduce congestion. (Again, it wasn’t designed to.) In addition to Wenk’s specific questions, he and others said there are basic issues of scale. Yellowstone has 350 miles of road and five entrances. By comparison, Acadia has 27 miles of motor roads.
Furthermore, many tourists come in one entrance and go out another; they also choose different destinations within the vast park. How do you coordinate a bus system for those idiosyncratic patterns?
“A mandatory shuttle diminishes the visitor experience,” Yellowstone superintendent Cam Sholly told me in a December interview. Imagine that you’re a birdwatcher, Sholly said. You get on a shuttle with someone who loves watching wolves in the Lamar valley, an angler headed for the Gibbon River, and a family loaded down with several picnic baskets. How does the park meet all of those people’s needs on the same bus? How can their experiences be anywhere near as fulfilling as they are in private automobiles, even with congestion?
“It’s not impossible,” Kack of WTI said. But even he acknowledged that it would be complicated and expensive, involving big-picture philosophical questions that could reconfigure the visitor experience.
Since the Linx experiment, the Park Service has tried to engage with some of those challenges. A 2022 feasibility study investigated congestion solutions at particular chokepoints, and ended up reinforcing Linx’ lessons.
Costs and benefits at specific sites
The Park Service had found through traffic studies in 2016-2018 that Yellowstone’s two most congested areas were on the north rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, and on the busy 16-mile road south of Madison Junction. This road carries traffic from the park’s most popular entrance at West Yellowstone to its most popular destination, the Old Faithful geyser. Would shuttles help?
“When you weigh the cost of building the infrastructure, the buses, paying the drivers and housing them—what is the gain?” Superintendent Sholly said. “The feasibility criteria set forth by the park weren’t fully met by any of the options.”
In addition to enhancing visitor experience, those feasibility criteria included factors such as minimizing infrastructure and costs, enhancing safety and minimizing impacts to resources and staff. Sholly said he remains open to creative solutions, and was intrigued by the surprising success of a 2021 pilot of a driverless shuttle in the Canyon Village area. But the traditional shuttles examined in this study didn’t prove worthy.
A deeper dive shows why. At Canyon, for example, the study examined various scenarios where shuttle buses would run every eight minutes along the side roads that take sightseers along the north and/or south rims. The study concluded that the shuttles would be feasible only if those roads carried fewer private vehicles. You didn’t have to bar cars outright, but you had to restrict them in some form, what’s known in industry jargon as “managed access.” Without managed access, the buses would get caught in the same congestion and most drivers would see no point in taking them.
In other words, the study implied, the solution to congestion is not adding buses, but rather reducing cars. Buses are simply the solution to a problem that such reductions create: people who are denied automotive access to those roads don’t get to experience the wonders along those roads. The Linx story showed the same lesson: a public transit lens (“hey, let’s start a bus system!”) is on its own insufficient to cure congestion.
A key conundrum about congestion in Yellowstone: everyone would prefer that the solution involve not taking a shuttle bus themselves, but having someone else take it.
The feasibility study did not define any “specific managed access method or desired conditions.” But its scenarios imagined 20-40 percent reductions in vehicles. And managed access appears to provide most of the benefits in all the scenarios. Managed access is what reduces roadway congestion and enhances visitor mobility. Meanwhile, shuttle buses are what compel most of the costs: everything from the buses themselves to housing for the bus drivers to new parking lots required to store the cars of the bus passengers.
How do you achieve that 20-40 percent reduction in vehicles? WTI’s David Kack believes it could be accomplished voluntarily: when he developed a transit business plan in 2009 at Grand Teton National Park, 46 percent of survey respondents were “likely” or “very likely” to take a bus.
But it’s possible that what people say in surveys differs from what they actually do. Thus, Yellowstone’s 2022 transit feasibility study foresees managed access requiring some form of involuntary limits on visitation, such as ticketing, timed-entry or reservation systems, or maybe even Manhattan-style congestion pricing. With such restrictions, taking a shuttle becomes mandatory for at least some park visitors.
“The reality is that most visitors don’t want reservation systems,” Cam Sholly said, using “reservation systems” as a shorthand for these various limits. He pointed to a 2016 visitor-use study, in which a mandatory parkwide shuttle bus system with parking outside Yellowstone’s boundaries received the highest opposition of any transportation management option, with 52 percent opposed. Temporary road closures, vehicle limits, day-use reservations, and other types of mandatory shuttles also scored poorly in the study.
Voluntary shuttle systems earned higher scores. But Linx was a voluntary system, and few people took it. Granted, it was just a pilot, not fully built out and not designed to address parkwide access questions. But it gets at a key conundrum about congestion in Yellowstone: everyone would prefer that the solution involve not taking a shuttle bus themselves, but having someone else take it.
Maybe that’s because for over a century, the Yellowstone visitor experience has been defined by the individualized automobile trip — in other words, our conception of Yellowstone is thoroughly intertwined with cars.
The car-centric park
Although Yellowstone was established on March 1, 1872, an equally important date may be July 31, 1915. That’s when the first tourist car legally entered the park’s boundaries. The opening had been scheduled for August 1, but when the superintendent looked at 35 cars waiting in Gardiner, he wired his superiors in Washington, D.C., asking to let some in the night before. Otherwise, he feared, they’d face a horrific traffic jam. Perceptions of congestion have always been with us.
Pre-automobile, Yellowstone had been a place of elitism and conformity. Almost all visitors took a five-day regimented stagecoach tour, most staying in luxury hotels and eating formal dinners. They had to be rich to afford the trip, and stopped only at sites their stagecoach drivers wanted to.
Post-automobile, Yellowstone became democratized. You could go when and where you wanted, and pack plenty of kids in the back seat for free. You could experience and interpret Yellowstone’s wonders for yourself.
Cars also popularized Yellowstone. By 1920, just five years into the new regime, more than half of visitors came in their own automobile, according to the park’s website. By 1925, reads an annual report, it was more than 70 percent. Many of the new visitors were middle-class families with interests centered on both natural wonders and their vehicles. For example, they opened their car windows and fed candy to black bears. Today we see that activity as inappropriate. But for several generations it defined a Yellowstone vacation — though it had almost never happened from a stagecoach.
Yellowstone’s physical infrastructure came to be designed around individual automobile travel: from scenic pullouts with interpretive signs to the suburban layout of Canyon Village to the very idea of a visitor center, modeled on a 1950s shopping center.
To a transit expert like David Kack, these are the bigger questions we never asked but now need to: “It’s important to give everyone access to the park,” he said. “But does that mean we have to let everyone drive there?”
And yet, to most people who love Yellowstone, the answer to that question may well be “yes.” After all, almost everyone alive today who has fallen in love with Yellowstone did so from a vehicle. Automobile dependence certainly has negative effects, which society needs to manage. But one step in managing is acknowledging the thorough intertwining of individual vehicle trips and people’s perceptions of the meaning of Yellowstone.
In a car, a tourist feels free and in control. Sure, you might get slowed by an occasional bison jam, but that involves seeing actual bison. Which is the whole point of your visit. Congestion just means that you’re sharing the wonder with others.
Where we are today
“People see pictures of traffic jams and imagine impacts on wildlife and resources,” Cam Sholly said. “But this is a 2.2 million acre park, bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, with less than 2,000 acres of pavement, and a large majority of people who never go farther than a half-mile from their car. Most of the park never sees a visitor.”
Thus the wild animals, and the broader ecosystem that supports them — which Yellowstone managers often call “the resource” — isn’t really bothered by congestion. “We’ve done significant monitoring on resource impacts, and we’ve seen very limited effects from traffic itself,” Sholly said.
The park has thus focused on small-scale solutions at specific pain points. “Forty-seven percent of traffic comes in the West Entrance,” Sholly said. “We now have a traffic management unit on that corridor. We have control staff at Norris [and other hotspots].” As visitation continues to grow, these efforts will have to become more aggressive.
But in the big picture, although locals may be frustrated by traffic, Yellowstone visitors as a whole are relatively unconcerned. In a 2018 visitor use survey, 85 percent rated their experience as “good” or “excellent.” In a 2024 survey, that rose to 98.2 percent. “It was surprising, given that 2024 had almost 700,000 more visits,” Sholly said. But the result suggests that there’s little urgency to large-scale reconsiderations of park transportation systems.
Nationwide trends suggest the same thing. In the last decade, national park transit ridership has fallen. The shuttles in Zion had 5.1 million boardings in 2024, down from 5.3 million in 2015. Likewise at the Grand Canyon South Rim (5 million vs. 7.4 million in 2015), Yosemite valley (1.7 million vs. 3.6 million in 2015), and Acadia (497,000 vs. 533,000 in 2015).
For that matter, public transit ridership is down nationwide, due to lifestyle changes resulting from the pandemic and work-from-home options. If Greater Yellowstone were to seek funding to create new public transit, it would compete with cash-strapped existing systems such as Philadelphia’s, and other federal priorities such as transit safety.
Paradoxically, the sustainability-oriented criteria that first drew the Yellowstone Business Partnership to public transit show slight promise: if electric-vehicle and work-from-home trends continue, we could burn less fossil fuel.
Public transit remains a good solution to the problem of getting lots of people to a singular destination, such as an office skyscraper, a Jackson Hole ski area, or a dead-end road in a park like Zion. A multi-entrance, multi-destination park like Yellowstone poses different problems, for which public transit may not be a good solution under existing conditions.
But maybe “under existing conditions” sells Yellowstone short. After all, under existing conditions in 1872, there was no way to preserve this special place.
Creativity and hope
None of the participants in Linx that I spoke to would have made the big decisions differently. They’d seen a problem and thought creatively about a solution. It didn’t work, but that just meant you needed more creative thinking, not less.
“I have no regrets,” said Arthur Kull, YBP’s final board chair, in a joint video call with Jan Brown and me. “I would try again. I’m an eternal optimist.”
Brown agreed, but expanded the thought: newer ideas would be even better, she said. Then they started brainstorming, partly, but not completely, in jest. What if the park banned most driving for a few hours each afternoon? What if extended autumn snowplowing allowed for a longer season? What if April, when the park is now mostly closed, became a month for bikes and shuttles only? What if Yellowstone had RV-only days? Or stagecoach-only days?
“We need to create incentives that don’t sound punitive,” Brown said. She knew that visitors wouldn’t like being restricted from driving their vehicles. But after decades of experience trying to make Greater Yellowstone a better place, she knew that the region’s wonders extended far beyond what you could see in your car. “Rather than centering the conversation on losing automobile access,” she said, “we could talk about what you might gain.”
