Saw this. These articles are
1. sort of true
2. totally overblown
The situation they describe is really mostly a holiday weekend issue. That said, weekend traffic is pretty bad. Our guests* went to the store last night. It should take about 1:30 (assuming 30 minutes in the store), but it took 2 hours.
At 3 million per year, Yosemite was easy - no traffic jams (barring road construction), not that hard to get a campsite
In 1996, Yosemite had 4 million visitors, but then the big flood closed the park for three months and it took until 2011 to hit 4 million visitors again and that felt like a sort of breaking point. We started seeing frequent traffic jams, parking lots filling up, people building reservation bots and selling reservations for campsites and Half Dome on Craigslist.
Last year we hit 5.2 million visitors and people started to wonder what the endpoint was. Clearly not sustainable and can't hit six million.
Ain't but one solution; raise the price
Ah... ye of little imagination. First of all, articles like this is probably one solution. When the LA Times incorrectly reported that you would no longer be able to drive your personal car in Yosemite, visitation dropped and didn't recover for a while. Lodging operators were fielding calls about this for six years and I still occasionally get inquiries from people who want to stay inside the park gates so they can drive their car in (the better, and correct, reason to stay inside the park gates is to not wait in line at the gate every day).
That said, other solutions proposed...
- A guy recently told me the obvious solution was to turn the two-lane road in Yosemite Valley into a four-lane road. When I told him that was never going to happen, he said "Don't be too sure. We have a new administration in Washington that has a different philosophy" and then went off on a rant about the right of the American people to visit their public lands any day of the year and it is up to the government to be sure that the infrastructure allows this... which I found a strange argument from someone who believes the govt should stay out of everything.
- The opposite: Edward Abbey said we should just take all roads out of the national parks and you can only enter on foot and crowding would go away overnight.
- a middle ground: no private vehicles. Entry only by foot or shuttle bus. People have been trying to crack this for Yosemite for years, but the issue is that there is no parking outside the park and so unlike Zion, you would be busing people for at least 1.5 hours and perhaps two. The Chambers of Commerce of the gateway communities will sue, unquestionably.
- a hybrid solution: high price of entry in a personal vehicle which subsidizes the shuttle system. This combines the problem of funding parking and running a shuttle system with the problem of being regressive (or tiered anyway) and is probably a non-starter.
- charge a lot. You probably live far enough away to be safe from the pitchforks.
- lottery system (as currently for Half Dome, Mt Whitney, rafting the Grand Canyon). I expect this to come in some form, but only after legal challenges from every Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Board in the region.
Ultimately, some form of limiting entry will happen only as a result of a legal action. I think all of the above solutions are such hot potatoes that NPS won't touch any of them without a court order forcing them to do so. Even with a court order, I expect counter-suits and undoubtedly, in these times we live in, death threats to the superintendent.
*Said guests being bakedjake, Angela, Jake's sister and, just by coincidence, Ralf (pontifix)'s niece... for a mini-summit.