An Economics Professor Visits the National Parks

This is a blog post from an economics professor at the University of Rochester, who spent the summer with some students in Kentucky and comments on visiting the Great Smoky Mountains National Park:

Any of you who read about parks and recreation have heard the noise that our National Parks are “woefully” underfunded, that there are decades of deferred maintenance backlogs, that they are threatened by overuse and so on. And nominally, all of that is true. But consider that the Great Smoky National Park is THE MOST visited park in the entire national park system … and it’s not even close. It gets almost triple the amount of visits as the Grand Canyon! From talking to a ranger, he thinks they get over 11 million visitors per year at the park.

And they charge each of these visitors … zero. Mind you, most visitors who come there are spending an inordinate amount of money to get to the park and to stay and eat and recreate near the park. If you’ve ever been to Gatlingburg and Pigeon Forge, you know what I mean (I’ll leave that rant for some other time). Needless to say, if a family of four is staying at a decent place near the main entrance to the park (there are other less busy entrances, I was over by Wear Cove) and they eat out once per day and they avail themselves of some of the absurd Vegas-like places, they are dropping an easy $2,000 just to be there. Yet, to “ensure access to all” the park remains free. I spend some of the most glorious recreational days of my life in the park this past week and paid zero dollars for it. Compared to everything else I was doing, it was worth well north of $500 to me.