National Park Service Sustainable Transportation

The National Park System is making a significant effort to encourage visitors to leave their personal automobiles and tour using alternative modes of transportation. The purpose of this project is to define visitors objectives and expectations for vacation trips to support design of the next generation of NPS alternative transportation vehicles.

Many of America’s most popular national parks are in danger of being “loved to death” by overcrowding, pollution, and damage to fragile environments by eager or careless visitors. The negative impacts could be reduced if a significant percentage of visitors were persuaded to adopt alternative transportation modes such as busses, trams, bicycles, or hiking. Because most visitors have shown a strong preference for touring by automobile, it would be necessary to make the visit experience far more attractive in the alternative conveyance than in the personal automobile.To optimize design of a next generation NPS conveyance, it would be useful to document the objectives, expectations and desires of NPS visitors. A taxonomy of goals for such recreational activities will be developed based on the Maslow Needs Hierarchy theory of motivation. Based on this new taxonomy, a series of survey instruments will be developed, pilot tested, and refined. The surveys may be used to evaluate the value that visitors place on a broad range of types of experience during recreation and in their everyday lives. Implications for the design of an interactive information system for use in alternative NPS transportation vehicles will be discussed.