[HN Gopher] Suit alleges recreation.gov cluttered with junk fees...
___________________________________________________________________
Suit alleges recreation.gov cluttered with junk fees, seeks
millions in refunds
Author : CoffeeOnWrite
Score : 196 points
Date : 2023-06-26 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nationalparkstraveler.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nationalparkstraveler.org)
| xrd wrote:
| This reminds me of Oracle managing the health care site for
| Oregon. I remember when a bunch of us in the open source
| community were trying to avoid Oracle getting this contract:
|
| https://www.marklogic.com/blog/oracle-oregon-lawsuit/
|
| But, Oracle got it anyway.
|
| Imagine if the dozens of Perl programmers had $240M and had
| recycled all that money back into the local economy.
|
| Could it have gone any worse even if that exchange was rewritten
| in Perl 6?
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| You could make the lottery tickets cheaper if you buy early and
| create a marketplace where you can sell or auction you tickets or
| winnings. Then they could take a percentage of that and ramp up
| prices to chase the market.
| coding123 wrote:
| Bigger problem is no-shows
| metafour wrote:
| Anyone have access to Pacer and can get us the filings since this
| article was written?
|
| Virginia Eastern District Court Case # 1:23-cv-00043
|
| I'm not familiar with any ways to get free access
|
| https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/47432813/Wilson_et_...
| 83 wrote:
| Pacer charges per page, but if you keep it under $30 in a
| quarter the bill is forgiven (so free).
|
| You'll eat up 300 pages pretty quickly - there's roughly 20
| filings between now and March 10 which I'm guessing is around
| when this article came out, probably too many pages to fit
| under the free limit but then again a lot of the activity isn't
| very interesting.
| uoaei wrote:
| The app is developed and managed by Booz Allen Hamilton. Insiders
| in the NPS that I've spoken to all have no nice things to say of
| them, primarily because of bloated contracts, underdelivery, and
| overruns.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Never let a crisis go to waste. Great opportunity to slot folks
| from the US Digital Service in to take ownership.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I don't think the USDS can take ownership unless you tried to
| claim eminent domain over the software. Not sure how that
| would work.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If it was a work commissioned by the US gov, and the
| contract stipulates they own the codebase, they own it
| (should be able to FOIA this). If the contract does not
| transfer ownership, and Booz Allen is getting paid to own
| and operate the web property, USDS spins up and does a
| reimplementation (or contributes some technologists to sit
| with technologists already at that federal agency, I've
| heard of both operating models during my interviews with
| USDS). Similar, but not as critical, as what happened with
| healthcare.gov.
|
| I was sloppy with my comment: when I say "take ownership",
| I meant over providing the service to the public (ie the
| responsibility), not the code itself. My apologies!
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
| switch/wp/2014/08/11...
| lacker wrote:
| The price of everything on recreation.gov is already so cheap,
| honestly I don't care about their fees. It's like, ten bucks in
| fees for staying a night somewhere in the San Francisco area.
| Far, far lower than Airbnb fees.
|
| The problem that most bugs me is how often reservations for
| popular campsites fill up the moment they become available. And
| then when you go camping, there are often empty sites. It's so
| cheap to reserve campsites, and you have to do it so far in
| advance, people reserve campsites they aren't sure they want,
| cancel their plans later, and don't even bother to inform the
| campgrounds.
| GuardianCaveman wrote:
| Pinnacles park is like 60 dollars a night. I bet I could get a
| hotel nearby for cheaper. It doesn't scale either for the
| season. I went to camp at a lake and recreation charged around
| 50 and the campsite was 20% full.
| lacker wrote:
| Cheapest motel in Soledad (near Pinnacles) looks like $110 a
| night right now. Plus there is a lot more demand for a
| campsite in Pinnacles than for a hotel room along the 101. I
| think the real value of that Pinnacles campsite is more like
| $200 a night. Depending on the time of year, of course.
|
| Pinnacles is not too bad a divergence, though - worse is
| Point Reyes, where a campsite costs $30 a night, but it's
| very close to San Francisco, and a hotel room would certainly
| cost hundreds of dollars a night. And Point Reyes is terrible
| for people reserving spots that they don't end up using.
| refurb wrote:
| Wait, we're allowed to sue business who have junk fees?
| tyingq wrote:
| This is pretty rampant across all levels of government. A couple
| of examples:
|
| - Several states/counties/cities/etc add a surcharge for credit
| card payments or transaction/processing fees for things like
| vehicle registration, paying traffic tickets, obtaining court
| records, paying property tax, etc.
|
| - Prisons and jails are really terrible with junk fees for both
| the prisoners and for systems set up for their friends/families
| to call or message them, send them food/sundries, etc. They also
| promote a system where you deposit funds in even chunks of $10,
| $20, $30, etc...then they keep the uneven remainder when you're
| no longer using their system.
| russdill wrote:
| I fail to see how passing on a credit card processing fee is
| rampant corruption.
| GuardianCaveman wrote:
| In one of the linked articles it shows one campsite who
| charged 5 dollars for a reservation but BAH was charging the
| campsite 6-8 dollars for the reservation. So they raised
| their prices to cover the more than 100% fee that the
| campsite had to pay for a service they used to offer for no
| extra charge to an organization they were forced to enter
| into by the state. Then BAH won't disclose anything about the
| fees and contract so we have a black box of a contract making
| god knows how much money in a monopoly.
|
| You could say well I don't know how Ticketmaster absorbing
| all competitors and becoming a defacto monopoly and charging
| 30% fees to the buyer and 30% fees to the booker and is
| rampant corruption since they're just passing on credit card
| processing fees.
| tyingq wrote:
| When the fee is clearly higher than what it's costing them.
| Either by the percentage itself, or often, a "minimum fee
| amount" that really exceeds the actual cost. A $2 minimum
| charge, for example, is somewhat common for things where the
| item/service is often much less than $100.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > They also promote a system where you deposit funds in even
| chunks of $10, $20, $30, etc...then they keep the uneven
| remainder when you're no longer using their system.
|
| Sounds like the meal plan at my kid's college. Unsurprising
| that they pattern their systems after those used to manage
| prisoners?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| If the credit network is going to charge you, say, 2% to
| process the transaction, why not make the user pay for that
| compared to much cheaper transaction methods, like direct bank
| transfers?
| tyingq wrote:
| The complaint is that the fee is often much higher than the
| actual cost. Actual cost, of course, varies by card type.
| Debit cards, for example, have a VERY SMALL average
| processing fee, AMEX has a large fee. Also, "minimum fees"
| that end up being much higher than the actual cost.
| Dowwie wrote:
| Who are these seven outdoor enthusiasts leading the way?
| tonymet wrote:
| There's a huge need for real investigative journalism into
| corruption like this. Kudos to the plaintiffs for exposing the
| grift.
|
| recreation.gov has some benefits - they've improved usability.
| The fees are punitive and obscure. Also there's lots of
| corruption and scalping on the site that they are not taking
| responsibility for.
| pistolpete333 wrote:
| You should check out Matt Stoller and the work he is doing to
| call out this kind of monopolization/corruption/regulatory
| failure across industries. His articles are extremely
| informative, eye opening and generally non-partisan in their
| analysis.
|
| He wrote an article calling out this situation with
| recreation.gov about a year ago
|
| https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...
| solardev wrote:
| As much as this type of corruption sucks... I gotta say
| recreation.gov is way better than what came before it, with every
| state and federal system doing their own random thing with
| terrible UX and horrible performance, and many campsites having
| no online presence at all.
|
| Many places now on recreation.gov used to require you to fax in
| reservations and wait days for a confirmation, or else just do
| the drive up and fill out a paper slip thing the morning of (too
| bad if they're all gone).
|
| Sure, it'd be nice to clean up the fees and get more money to the
| parks themselves, but I gotta give credit to the website for
| cleaning up what used to be a nightmare and turning it into a
| pretty streamlined (if slightly more expensive) process.
|
| Edit: Imagine if we had a similar system for the departments of
| motor vehicles... pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes
| online instead of hours at the local office. Who wouldn't pay for
| that if they could afford it?
|
| Of course it would be better to have actually functional public
| services, but our governments just don't seem to be set up to
| actually be effective at basic services. Is it worse for public
| dollars to get funneled to a public private partnership with an
| overhead, that at least delivers a functional product, or to just
| disappear forever into the coffers of bureaucrats and their
| cronies with nothing to show for it?
| akiselev wrote:
| _> Imagine if we had a similar system for the departments of
| motor vehicles... pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes
| online instead of hours at the local office._
|
| You don't have that? The only time I've ever had to visit a DMV
| office in the decade and a half was upon first moving to the
| state since they need to take a photo for the new ID and
| inspect the VIN number on the new registration. There was some
| sort of ticketing system so even when I got there without an
| appointment, I didn't have to stand in line long
|
| The online stuff is usually cheaper since its all renewals.
| solardev wrote:
| It just depends on your state and what particular service you
| need. I've moved around a lot and lived in a few states, and
| some of them were particularly bad.
|
| But yes, simple in-state renewals tend to be the easiest, and
| can often be done online. But things like custom license
| plates (for an already registered vehicle) or cross-state
| transfers (when you've been driving for 20+ years) or
| changing your address or donor status or whatever... can be
| more difficult than necessary.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The downside of a central system is that sites can't set really
| custom rules. Things like "we don't allow anyone not associated
| with the XYZ festival to book a spot in the 3 days leading up
| to the XYZ festival" are really hard to handle with a big
| centralized booking system - whereas they are easy to handle
| with a little local office that does everything by hand.
| solardev wrote:
| Yeah, a complex rules engine is indeed one of the challenges
| of such a system. But you can at least handle the most common
| scenarios and take some of the load off the park. Like in
| Yosemite, a basic Half Dome permit is handled through
| recreation.gov, but if you're doing overnight backpacking or
| big wall climbing in addition to Half Dome, those could be
| handled differently and outside of recreation.gov...
| https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/hdpermits.htm
|
| For a festival, though, I imagine it could be handled
| similarly to hotel rooms... block off a certain # of sites
| for the exclusive use of some "XYZFEST23" coupon code or
| similar. Not sure if recreation.gov actually supports that,
| but it's not an insurmountable problem.
| 1024core wrote:
| > pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes online instead of
| hours at the local office. Who wouldn't pay for that if they
| could afford it?
|
| Prompt access to government services should not require extra
| payment. Because then you're providing them an incentive to
| further kneecap the system. Hypothetically, imagine if this
| figure (20%) was now 2000%. Would that be fair? I'm sure some
| people would be able to pay that sum for processing in minutes,
| while the rest of us have to wait several hours.
| colechristensen wrote:
| > pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes online instead of
| hours at the local office
|
| A AAA membership in California does this for you for some
| things. Zero wait to register a purchased vehicle in silicon
| valley, possibly Mountain View I don't remember it's been a
| couple of years.
|
| On the other hand I look like an axe murderer on my CA drivers
| license as the convoluted process took three hours and required
| starting over twice due to mistakes by the clerks.
| asdff wrote:
| I always here people having such trouble at CA DMVs and I
| wonder how that ends up happening. I don't have any problem
| and I go to pretty busy big city DMVs too. I think its
| because I book an appointment ahead of time online, because
| whenever I show up they usher me right in to the clerk past
| the line of pissed off people outside. One time when this
| happened the person first in line nearly fought the DMV
| worker for letting me in, people behind him had to try and
| calm him down and I got inside as soon as I could.
| solardev wrote:
| There is a lot of variance between different DMV offices in
| California, between different services, and between the
| individual staff members who are helping you.
|
| I've had no-appointment things get done in 5 minutes as a
| walkup, and also 3-hour waits despite having an
| appointment. Total crapshoot =/
| solardev wrote:
| I used to think California's was bad, then I tried to move my
| license to Chicago... that took 8+ hours (literally... got
| there before opening and stayed until after closing) at the
| local office there, 4-5 different sets of lines (3 of them in
| the same office), and I think a total of 12 bureaucrats,
| queue watcher, and security guards.
|
| Then I tried had to do the same thing in Oregon a few years
| later. That took one person about 20 minutes to finish.
|
| It's just crazy how much variance there is between states &
| offices.
| tonymet wrote:
| at what cost? and what is the governance model? The suit is
| more about the lack of governance with the free structure and
| not abiding by the law about establishing fees .
|
| Here's one example from the article
|
| Last year there were 22,435 lottery applicants for a permit to
| run the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. Only 330
| individuals received a permit. Yet, all applicants paid the $6
| lottery fee -- even unsuccessful lottery applicants. Under Booz
| Allen's arrangement with the federal government, it could
| pocket all lottery fees, which amounted to $134,610 just for
| the Middle Fork lottery
| solardev wrote:
| For clarity, I'm totally for this suit, and hope that the
| public can claw back those dollars.
|
| But in the grand scheme of things, that seems like such a
| minor technicality. $6 to $15 here or there, a couple times a
| year on vacation, is way better than the alternative systems
| that were common before recreation.gov, with faxed lotteries,
| long delays, and high uncertainty. It used to be common that
| you'd just have to drive to the place, wait an hour or two in
| line, pay the admission fee (if you don't have a annual
| pass), then sign up for some lottery on the spot at like 7am
| and wait a few hours to hear back. If you don't get it, well,
| there goes your plans... but you're already there.
|
| By contrast, a small fee here and there for the ahead-of-time
| guarantee of a reservation is totally worth it. $130,000 to
| run a lottery system effectively? That's not a whole lot.
| Even if it costs a few million, nationally, to run them...
| that's nothing. I can pretty much guarantee you the NPS,
| USFS, and BLM together wouldn't be able to run a smooth
| national reservation & lottery system with the same budget
| and fees. The agencies themselves are so far removed -- in
| both mission and skill set -- from modern app UX that they
| probably wouldn't be able to get the job done even with 10x
| the budget.
|
| I don't doubt that the contractor (Booz Allen Hamilton) is a
| scumbag for pocketing those fees, which are unnecessary to
| begin with (it's not like it costs $15 in CPU or human
| processing time to do a change). It'd be great if the public
| gets those back.
|
| All I'm saying is that recreation.gov is _totally and
| absolutely worth it_ despite these fees, despite the
| increased costs to the public, because it actually _works_ ,
| vs the chaos that came before it. That website makes public
| lands FAR more discoverable, accessible, and reliable -- at
| the cost of minor corruption. I think that is an ultimately
| acceptable tradeoff, even if it's not ideal. (And it's not
| like I'm some libertarian; I love our parks and public lands,
| but digital anything just really isn't their strong suit. I'm
| grateful they outsourced it.)
|
| Maybe what we need, in lieu of effective federal digital
| agencies, is some sort of public-FOSS partnership that can
| take the place of public-private partnerships. But that's
| much harder for the agencies to deal with than a central
| commercial entity with designated contacts, support, etc. And
| the FOSS model isn't really set up to communicate in the real
| world with the super complicated division of public lands
| across federal/state/local/agency divides, each with their
| own little fiefdoms and idiosyncrasies and rules and
| regulations.
|
| I wonder how other countries manage similar use cases
| (digital presence for public lands)? Recently went hiking in
| Taiwan and reserved a trail permit; the UX was terrible even
| by 90s standards -- at least it was online -- but at least it
| worked. Not sure how they funded it, but I don't remember
| there being any fees.
| thorncorona wrote:
| > All I'm saying is that recreation.gov is totally and
| absolutely worth it despite these fees, despite the
| increased costs to the public, because it actually works,
| vs the chaos that came before it.
|
| > at the cost of minor corruption.
|
| I would hope the government does not adopt "Value Based
| Pricing," given that we already pay them plenty in taxes.
| And when we discover corruption, we should kill it.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I wonder why it is necessary to have all these limits and
| reservation slots in the first place?
|
| In Austria, when you want to go on a hike, you just go.
| Sure, there are some popular routes that are crowded, but
| 99% of our national parks are completely empty. As soon as
| you can't drive somewhere and it takes a few hours to hike
| there, it's pretty empty anyway.
|
| Are there so many more hikers in the US, or is this about
| limiting access to the most popular routes?
| thorncorona wrote:
| Some parks are particularly popular, and a reservation
| system is needed to minimize impact on trails / the
| environment.
| trailbits wrote:
| Too many public lands in the US are managed like
| amusement parks instead of nature parks. These places
| would be less crowded and there would be less need for
| lotteries and permits if visitors had to make more of an
| effort to get there and use them. You don't even need to
| pack a picnic when you can count on a cafe and restaurant
| in the park. Once you are there and tying up a precious
| parking spot, you don't have to hike to see the scenery
| -- you can go into the air conditioned theatre and watch
| the park movie! Have an ice cream! Don't want to listen
| to the birds? You can listen to a live band at the lodge
| instead. Instead of allowing contractors and
| concessionaires to exploit these unique public treasures,
| the parks could focus on preservation instead.
| solardev wrote:
| I'm not sure how it works in other countries -- and I
| hope I'm not explaining something you already know -- but
| the US has a LOT of different types of public land
| designations (https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45340.pdf PDF
| page 9) and agencies to manage them
| (https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF10585.pdf)
|
| Some, like the most prominent parts of National Parks,
| are specifically managed to enable easy access (and also
| ADA accessibility, like wheelchair-friendly paths). There
| are also preservation-focused areas, especially but not
| only Wilderness (our highest form of protection,
| designated by Congress, prohibits motorized traffic and
| most buildings, often no use of machines like chainsaws
| or ATVs, though most will allow pack mules and such).
| Many multi-use areas (National Forests, BLM land, etc.)
| also have minimal facilities, often just a dirt lot and
| maybe a pit toilet if you're lucky. On the other hand,
| some smaller National Monuments might have no accessible
| areas EXCEPT for a visitor center and parking lot,
| usually to protect some extremely limited or fragile
| resource.
|
| The USA is HUGE and many lands are public and/or
| protected for various reasons, to different goals. Not
| every trail is a National Park, and not every National
| Park is there for hiking or backpacking.
|
| And it's also not merely a matter of land designation.
| Crowding can happen even in designated wilderness areas,
| often the result of a place going viral or being in close
| proximity to a major city or whatever.
| jjav wrote:
| > I wonder why it is necessary to have all these limits
| and reservation slots in the first place?
|
| For one thing it generates a lot of profits for both
| recreation.gov and (somewhat less) the parks. That's
| unavoidably going to be a motivation for ever more limits
| and lotteries.
|
| For me that's really soured the idea of going to these
| places. In the 90s I'd go to any park, show up and hike
| wherever without any limits, it was great. Now it's hard
| to be able to ever go, let alone luck into the limited
| slots.
| pxeboot wrote:
| Most of the lotteries/reservations are for cabins,
| campgrounds, and rafting popular rivers. For day hiking,
| very few places require a permit.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There's often a daily park admission fee you pay at the
| gate. Per person or per car, it varies. Sometimes
| included with a camping reservation, sometimes not.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This fee goes to the park itself. Booz allen only gets
| paid for the lottery system.
| brewdad wrote:
| They are also getting paid for every campsite reservation
| and many "free" permits that are first come first served.
| One example, the parking lot for Multnomah Falls in the
| Columbia River Gorge requires a permit that allows you to
| enter a rest area off the interstate during a specific
| one hour period that also serves as the parking for the
| falls. You may then stay as long as you like. The permits
| are free but I you pay a $2 fee per car to recreation.gov
| for the privilege.
|
| Despite being a highway rest area it is illegal to stop
| there from Memorial Day to Labor Day without a pre-
| purchased permit. I generally avoid the area during high
| season so I have no idea how strictly this is enforced
| should you ever have an urgent need for a toilet.
| solardev wrote:
| > For day hiking, very few places require a permit.
|
| These days though, even day hiking is increasingly
| permitted :( I live near the Oregon Cascades, an area
| that used to be unpermitted but got too popular. A few
| years ago they introduced a permit system (for both day
| hikes and overnights), but implemented it terribly... a
| large % of the permits were released on a single day and
| were sold out within hours.
|
| People ended up hoarding multiple permits for multiple
| weekends because they couldn't be sure which weekend they
| could go (or what the weather would be like), then 40% of
| the permit holders never showed up on their given
| reservations... so nobody got to go. They've since
| tweaked the system.
|
| https://www.opb.org/article/2022/02/16/wilderness-permit-
| cen...
|
| Your point absolutely stands -- that day hike permits are
| still largely unusual across the entirety of the US
| public lands systems -- but more and more places are
| getting so popular that they do require reservations.
| It's one of the downsides of social systems like TikTok
| or Alltrails, which improve discoverability but also
| focus public attention on the few best trails rather than
| the thousands of "still pretty good" trails.
| solardev wrote:
| Yes, it's the "most popular" routes/campsites/activities
| that are the most impacted, but "most popular" is a
| moving target. A lot of our public lands become victims
| of their own successes, especially in the age of
| Instagram and TikTok.
|
| Decades past, nobody but the most adventurous would visit
| these places and reservations were never an issue. Then,
| with increased visibility/awareness (starting from things
| like the American Automobile Association magazines, to
| TripAdvisor, to these days TikTok and Alltrails)
| visitation kept going up and up and up and up and the
| lands and agencies couldn't keep up.
|
| This is especially the case with our major parks
| (Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion) but even smaller places can
| become an issue with enough social media exposure:
|
| Horseshoe Bend in Arizona:
| https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/instagram-tourism-booms-
| hor...
|
| Or Muir Woods just outside of San Francisco:
| https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Wildly-popular-
| Muir-W...
|
| So places have to try different strategies, including but
| not limited to lotteries, park-and-ride shuttles, timed
| reservations, rotating closures, etc. to both enable
| access but also protect the very resources that people
| are flocking to see.
|
| It's not just a top-down effort either. There are
| grassroots NGOs dedicated to trying to balance visitation
| vs preservation, like Leave No Trace (https://lnt.org/)
| and the Access Fund (https://www.accessfund.org/).
|
| It's a hard problem all around... you want people to be
| able to easily enjoy the lands that their tax dollars pay
| for, but when there are TOO many people (and tourists,
| both domestic and international)... it gets crazy.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| It's just for the popular national parks and it's only
| about the popular seasons, and a lot of it has to do with
| motor vehicle traffic. My partner and I ride our bikes to
| most parks or we visit parks off-peak and we almost never
| bother with any of this.
|
| EDIT: I've always wondered why more private companies
| don't create shared buses to help backpackers hit the
| entrance to the park. A lot of the times just getting to
| the entrance is what makes folks use their cars, and if
| you could park in a nearby town and take a shuttle in and
| start your backpacking that would go a long way. I know
| some parks run shuttles inside the park but I'm talking
| about a more backpacker/cyclist specific transport just
| to the entrance to minimize impact on the park itself.
| jjav wrote:
| > My partner and I ride our bikes to most parks or we
| visit parks off-peak and we almost never bother with any
| of this.
|
| No doubt this is sometimes true, but all the permits &
| reservations I'm aware of in parks are for the hikes
| themselves, it doesn't matter how you arrived there.
| solardev wrote:
| > I've always wondered why more private companies don't
| create shared buses to help backpackers hofit the
| entrance to the park.
|
| Don't they, though? I've seen these at Zion, the Lost
| Coast, the Cascades, Olympic National Park, etc. And
| around big cities, often the city/county itself will
| provide a direct-to-trailhead bus.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I'm only familiar with the Zion shuttle. I probably need
| to do more research here thanks!
| solardev wrote:
| Do you ever check before you just show up? There's not
| enough rangers to go around checking permits on every
| trail, but if you're unlucky and get caught without a
| permit when you're supposed to have one, you might have
| to pay a fine (not the end of the world) but also might
| get turned around (ruining your vacation plans). And if
| the same ranger catches you twice on the same trail after
| turning you around... lol... they tend not to be too
| happy.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| We don't, but we also check the hike-bike site locations
| beforehand, grab all the necessary backcountry permits,
| and also try to hoof it in early to maximize chances of
| getting a site. Of course since we're on bike we plan a
| lot more than most visitors in a car (since we plan out
| water stops, food, clothing changes, etc etc.) We've
| definitely encountered the occasional ranger but they're
| usually _much_ friendlier to bikers than drivers in my
| experience.
| solardev wrote:
| That's good to know! Can't wait to try to my first
| bikepacking trip :)
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Absolutely! I can't recommend backpacking through the
| parks enough. A petty part of me can get quite smug
| biking or backpacking past a traffic jam near the
| entrance haha. Also, the views you get on foot are
| absolutely marvelous and there's a sense of "earning"
| your mileage that I find unparalleled. You'll need to be
| more careful with planning of course (also don't forget
| things like bear-proofing food and accounting for wind if
| you're on a bike), and even the best laid plans will fail
| and you'll end up camping some place you didn't intend
| on, but it's all part of the journey!
| solardev wrote:
| I've done a lot of backpacking (from a car or shuttle),
| but never bikepacking or biking-to-backpack. Is the
| latter possible, like is there a good way to fit a
| backpacking pack, bear can, etc. inside panniers or
| otherwise tethered to a bike?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Absolutely. You can look online to see all sorts of cool
| loadouts that folks have, but the easiest way to do it is
| to just get a bunch of bungie cords and large panniers
| and stuff things inside. The trick is to distribute the
| weight evenly among your panniers so that you don't
| unbalance the bike. A huge loadout can have up to 4 large
| panniers (2 in back, 2 in front) along with stuff hitched
| to a rear rack up top. My partner and I tend to do 2
| panniers each, where we each take our stuff and I take
| some of the heavier/larger common stuff (bear cans,
| tent.) There's a whole world of bikepacking and
| bike/backpack loadouts out there.
| solardev wrote:
| Great advice. Thank you!
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| 99% of national park and forest activities do not require
| a reservation. It's only for the most popular hikes and
| river rafting, with some exceptions.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Counterpoint: for ten years prior to 2020 I rented a forest
| service cabin in a national forest on a holiday weekend
| every year and never once had any issue navigating the pre-
| Booz system. I agree it was not a very fancy site but it
| worked. I do not disagree with you that it is more
| accessible now, and I agree that the more people who get to
| access the parks, the better.
| solardev wrote:
| Was that with ReserveAmerica, by chance? That was another
| public-private partnership:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReserveAmerica that a lot
| of campsites used before Recreation.gov
|
| But it's true, it used to be a lot easier to find space!
| I'm especially sad that a long-time dream of mine
| (staying at firewatch tower) seems completely out of
| reach now. Selfishly, I do yearn for the times when the
| outdoors were a more exclusive club. But the American
| (and communitarian) in me recognizes these as public
| lands, to be shared by all, even if wider access
| personally inconveniences me. I feel lucky that I got to
| experience some of these places at all before they blew
| up... as a millennial, I guess I'm part of that last
| generation that still knows what it was like pre-
| internet. Gens Z and beyond may never have that luxury of
| experiencing a public place that 10,000 TikTokers hadn't
| already been to... last week.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I highly recommend checking out the National Forest
| system if you haven't. Mendocino National Forest is an
| absolute gem. It's huge, rugged, and full of places to
| go. It's still quite fiddly to figure out what to do
| there and because it's not as popular as the NPs it's
| largely untouched.
| solardev wrote:
| Spent a lot of time in the NorCal regions (Klamath, Six
| Rivers, Shasta-Trinity), but only a little around Mendo.
| Any particular highlights?
|
| Side note: And this is exactly how the best places get
| overcrowded, lol ;)
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Yet, all applicants paid the $6 lottery fee -- even
| unsuccessful lottery applicants.
|
| You actually need the lottery fees not to be refunded,
| otherwise people will spam the system, knowing they will get
| their lottery fee returned to them if they are not
| successful.
| taftster wrote:
| That's interesting and extremely agitating. I had always
| thought the majority of the lottery fees were going back to
| the park for use and maintenance of the resource.
|
| I get it, there is an underlying profit motive that needs to
| be satisfied by the hosting company (Booz). And
| recreation.gov is sure tons better than anything that came
| before (especially for rafting trip lotteries). But yeah,
| there's a lot of money there that really should mostly being
| going back to the management entity.
| Ductapemaster wrote:
| I would like to understand why this is a problem?
| Objectively, they ran the lottery, distributed the permits,
| and charged a fee to do so. What is your objection
| specifically?
|
| I don't intend to passively inject an opinion -- just trying
| to understand your position.
| tonymet wrote:
| It doesn't abide by the law (the plaintiffs case).
|
| It's not free enterprise: the govt is granting them a
| monopoly on ticket sales for those events.
|
| It's economically inefficient. The operators are making
| insane profit margins (likely 75%+ ) with no competition.
|
| These are public resources funded by tax payers. The
| operator is making illegal and unreasonable profit on the
| taxpayers property
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| The item of value being offered by the lottery is taxpayer
| funded, whereas most lotteries fund prizes via the proceeds
| of the lottery tickets.
|
| In this way, it can be considered exploitative since the
| proceeds don't go back into "the pot" to any degree.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The value being provided here is the website, which
| received no taxpayer funding other than the lottery
| proceeds.
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| Ah, I stand corrected, looking at Booz's website I see
| that the agreement from the start was no upfront cost to
| taxpayers.
| StillBored wrote:
| But an endless cost on the backend...
|
| Sounds like a great deal. At least for one political
| party who's entire theory of government is starving the
| beast. Labeling a fee based rental agreement as not being
| a tax is more important than what the actual final use
| cost actually is. Even if the users actually paying the
| fee end up spending orders of magnitude more in the long
| run. Its a fantastic way to hide immense sums of
| corruption, it just needs to be done one dollar at a
| time.
| asdff wrote:
| The state and federal governments trains hundreds of
| thousands of computer science engineers a year.
| Engineering students are also in dire need of internships
| to appear employable. Seems like another way to run a
| website at little cost to taxpayers would be an
| internship program using a portion of the massive
| engineering workforce government is already paying to
| train, although that would mean a consultants hands are
| removed from the honeyjar.
|
| Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if booze allens own
| college summer interns are doing the bulk of the work on
| this website.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Therein lies the rub: the people we selected to represent
| us turned us into a cash flow which they then sold to a
| government contractor. Instead of buying us a website,
| they sold us.
| StillBored wrote:
| The _POINT_ of computers and websites is to lower the
| individual transactional costs of things like applying
| for a lottery. Rather than having to pick up the phone
| and speak to a person, or drive to the local office and
| fill out paperwork.
|
| Yet somehow, the person in the toll booth option has
| regularly been the cheaper option than paying these
| immense fee's to obviously corrupt government
| contractors.
|
| How many web site designers and colocated machines does
| it take to run a freaking reservation system that
| probably gets a couple million reservations a day.
|
| Plus, if done correctly a large initial investment and
| then a trivial amount of work to keep it running, where
| the vast majority of the work is the local parks/etc
| changing the state of campground availability/etc.
|
| Put another way, everyone wants to be the credit card
| companies that have successfully gotten massively rich on
| a system where they are taking a percentage of the total
| transactional value rather than a trivial flat per
| transaction fee. And this model doesn't belong anywhere
| near public systems because those public lands exist for
| the "public", the majority of which can barely afford the
| gas to get to the park, much less funneling more of their
| meager resources to a fat cat government contractor.
|
| $6 is close to an hours work for someone making minimum
| wage.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > How many web site designers and colocated machines does
| it take to run a freaking reservation system that
| probably gets a couple million reservations a day.
|
| The cool thing about the US is that it's a democracy. If
| you feel so strongly about this, make this case to the
| government. There's precedent and it's bad, it's called
| healthcare.gov. I don't mean this in a pithy way btw, I'm
| a transit activist and I go to protests, phone up
| lawmakers, and attend public meetings. There are a wide
| array of small reasons that all sum up to the government
| being really bad at certain things. But again, this can
| change with _you and me_. Don 't be emotional on HN, be
| emotional to your state reps!
|
| > The _POINT_ of computers and websites is to lower the
| individual transactional costs of things like applying
| for a lottery. Rather than having to pick up the phone
| and speak to a person, or drive to the local office and
| fill out paperwork.
|
| You're forgetting the huge growth our National Parks have
| seen. The days of the toll booth worked when the US had a
| fraction of its people, a fraction of the motor vehicle
| traffic, before the virality of social media, and with a
| more ingrained belief that a national park was a rugged
| place and not a place to take the family in an air
| conditioned, controlled experience. The old system of
| phone calls would have just made the parks out of reach
| for all of these new folks interested in them.
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| >You're forgetting the huge growth our National Parks
| have seen
|
| Except this isn't true. 2022 saw 311.9 million visitors,
| up from 2000 which saw 285.8 million. That's not "huge"
| growth, that's not even keeping up with population growth
| (2020: 329 million vs 2000: 282 million).
| https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/visitation-numbers.htm
| solardev wrote:
| Those extra millions aren't evenly distributed across the
| parks system, though. Some parks are seeing way more
| growth than others. Breakdown here (annual view,
| aggregate by park, filter by National Park designation):
| https://www.nps.gov/subjects/socialscience/visitor-use-
| stati...
|
| For example, Smoky Mountains NP went from 8M in 1980 to
| 10M in 2000 to 14M in 2022.
|
| Zion went from 1M in 1980 to 2.4M in 2000 to 4.7 M in
| 2022.
|
| Yosemite went from 2.5M to 5M+, much of that concentrated
| in the Valley.
|
| For the impacted parks, it is very difficult to keep up
| with that sort of growth. It's not like those parks grow
| bigger to keep up with visitation, or hire staff at the
| same rate, or are able to build more parking lots.
|
| Edit: And also, for Wilderness-designated areas -- whose
| purpose is to provide a "wilderness feel" for current and
| future generations, as distinct from the "crowded
| Yosemite lodge feel" -- it's an even tougher ask. There
| are only so many trails you can build through a glacier
| or a meadow or a ridgetop before you erode the wilderness
| feel completely, and it's hard to spread groups out
| enough on those few trails so that they're not swarming
| past each other.
| sh34r wrote:
| > The old system of phone calls would have just made the
| parks out of reach for all of these new folks interested
| in them.
|
| Deep down, that's what a lot of the critics want a return
| to. They just won't say the quiet part out loud.
| solardev wrote:
| It's not even some deep, dark secret... who wouldn't
| treasure their own little slice of paradise, known only
| to them and those dearest to them? Who wouldn't want to
| be able to experience a special natural place as though
| they were the only ones there? Who can blame people for
| wanting to keep these special places, special?
|
| It's part of the everyday jobs of these agencies to try
| to maintain that illusion for its visitors, where
| possible. And part of why it's so hard to do juggle these
| needs. We could of course tear down more forest and build
| more parking lots around our parks, then add more paved
| trails and tramways and escalators to different parts of
| the park, turning them into amusement parks... but that
| would defeat the point. It's not easy to balance visitor
| accessibility with resource protection, especially when
| so many visitors barely ever step outside of their
| vehicles to go on the trails, instead tending to horde
| the most scenic viewpoints at a quick stop.
|
| The NPS was established primarily as an automotive
| touring network, and were designed as such. Only recently
| have we started to try to encourage motorists to exit
| vehicles and actually fan out across the park, but it's
| not easy. And even that effort eventually backfires, as
| more and more people DO hit the trails and in turn crowd
| them, too. At some point lotteries are inevitable. Even
| designating new parks isn't really a fix, especially
| since people will horde new parks all at once in its
| first few years (see Indiana Dunes, which used to be a
| laid-back state park and then became a major destination
| because of its new National Park designation).
|
| Don't get me wrong: I think it's awesome that more people
| are able to participate in our public lands (and in turn
| develop an appreciation for nature, wilderness, maybe
| even the climate and conservation, etc.). But it
| absolutely HAS to be deliberately managed, or our lands
| will be "loved to death"...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| 100%. The NPS is fundamentally a balance between the
| desires of the taxpayers funding to conserve this land
| who also want to visit it and the inherent need to keep
| this land as untouched as possible to keep their rugged,
| wilderness feel and to preserve the ecological diversity
| in the area. All the while not leaving park visitors to
| die due to bear attacks or a fall causing a broken bone.
| It's a very difficult job. Restricting access and
| offering lotteries is also in my view inevitable.
| post-it wrote:
| The objection is that this is a government monopoly
| funnelling money to a private company beyond what GP (and
| myself) consider to be a reasonable profit margin.
| csharpminor wrote:
| As someone who participates in these lotteries, the lack of
| transparency is the biggest issue. If there's a way to view
| estimated odds I have not seen it.
|
| Additionally, these lotteries usually have a second level
| of rules that impact your odds. For example, day of week or
| starting trailhead. I would gladly shift dates / routes and
| apply for different lotteries, but I have little basis to
| make those decisions on.
| pc86 wrote:
| If there are only 330 permits don't the odds depend
| entirely on how many people sign up?
| anthlax wrote:
| Perhaps the above comment means that the secondary
| factors affect the denominator - i.e more people go
| hiking on Saturday, so entering the Saturday lottery is
| worse than entering the Wednesday one
| csharpminor wrote:
| Exactly, and it impacts the denominator by a great
| margin.
|
| The value of the lottery ticket to me is a function of
| the cost, odds, timing and interest I have in the
| destination.
|
| If the odds of one trailhead are 1000x lower than another
| one that is comparable across the other variables then
| I'm needlessly overpaying, and Booze Allen pockets that
| inefficiency.
| csharpminor wrote:
| Sure, but they could display odds from past lotteries or
| provide current odds at time of purchase. You really have
| no clue what you're getting when you give them your
| $6-$15.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I would happily code and run a lottery system for $0.99 per
| entry. Someone else would likely do it for cheaper than
| that.
|
| It just seems egregiously expensive.
| solardev wrote:
| If you have the means, how about starting a better-run
| company or cooperative or nonprofit to compete against
| the likes of Booz? I'd love to join and/or support such
| an effort.
| jtbayly wrote:
| > campsites having no online presence at all.
|
| I don't think this was an improvement. It has led to fewer
| people being able to use the campsites, as they are easily and
| cheaply reserved. Thus, people who have plenty of money to
| spare reserve them on the off-chance of wanting to use it that
| day. But when that day comes, they don't show up.
| LoFiSamurai wrote:
| Yep. Personally seen people book two weeks for the off chance
| they might go for one of those days.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| Unless they're doing individual daily reservations, it
| doesn't work like that. You forfeit the entire reservation
| if you don't arrive on the start date, but you can always
| depart early.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| You can edit your reservation, which means you can book
| two weeks, then change it so you only use the last three
| days of July 3,4,5 (for example). This means that by the
| time reservations open for July 3, all the spots are
| taken.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Sounds like the solution to that is just a large deposit
| that's refundable upon arrival?
| varenc wrote:
| Doesn't that still just favor people with more money? If
| you're tight on money you won't be able to afford the
| deposit. And if you're really rich you still don't care
| about the deposit.
|
| Also in many places the camping fee itself is already
| steep.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Correct it doesn't equalize the richest to the poorest,
| but it does equalize much more of the in-between, where
| surely the vast majority of this issue lives.
|
| In general it seems with runaway wealth inequality we
| need an easy way to set fees and fines as a % of ability-
| to-pay (i.e. equalized pain-of-payment). We also need
| this for parking and traffic violations, for example.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Imagine if we had a similar system for the departments of
| motor vehicles... pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes
| online instead of hours at the local office.
|
| The counties here have provided that for at least 30 years and
| without any 3rd party or paid priority for the non-poor.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I doubt there was online self-service for the DMV in 1993
| anywhere in the world.
| connicpu wrote:
| Not the internet as we know it today, but I wouldn't be
| surprised if some isolated departments experimented with
| dial-in services back then. If you could make a phone call
| and you had a modem, you could connect to a remote
| terminal.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| My fault. I missed the online qualification and rushed
| right to part where our tax dollars buy great service and
| low wait times (and Sat hours). We've only had an online
| option for about 10 years.
| q845712 wrote:
| as someone else is already saying -- Arizona basically already
| has this for DMVs. There's a parallel system of privately owned
| and operated offices where you can make an appointment to e.g.
| get your drivers license. You show up right around your
| appointment time, there's somebody ready to help you within
| minutes, and everything is streamlined / easy. Most pleasant
| experience I've ever had of getting a license in a new state.
| In that case it was never clear to me whether I paid extra for
| the private service or not, but whatever I paid seemed
| unremarkable.
| solardev wrote:
| I wish we had a trickle-up, trickle-down system where states
| could experiment with different strategies/providers for
| tackling some public use case, and the successful ones could
| push that up to Congress to then disseminate back down to
| other states.
|
| But alas, either that never happens because nobody cares
| (most digital services) or it becomes a political
| battleground (California vs Texas in education). Sometimes I
| hate our system of powerful states vs centralized nations...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > But alas, either that never happens because nobody cares
| (most digital services) or it becomes a political
| battleground (California vs Texas in education). Sometimes
| I hate our system of powerful states vs centralized
| nations...
|
| You hit the nail on the head. We have a trickle down
| system, where states implement services differently. The
| reason states don't learn from each other is because of the
| huge culture war. Texas would rather freeze the state than
| learn from California, and California would rather pay 20x
| for public infrastructure than accept a contractor based
| out of Nevada due to the state's political leanings. It
| infects every piece of cross-state collaboration and is
| also why Federal budgetary politics are so acrimonious
| these days.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Of course it would be better to have actually functional
| public services, but our governments just don't seem to be set
| up to actually be effective at basic services.
|
| It's amazing to me that people will just blow by this point
| while accepting corporate monopolization of what should be a
| public resource.
|
| > or to just disappear forever into the coffers of bureaucrats
| and their cronies with nothing to show for it?
|
| It's better that the people who do this are punished. Either
| with criminal charges or with the removal of their ability to
| bid for future government contracts.
|
| The government is a sucker client. They pay huge contracts,
| always on time, and never follow up after they get screwed. And
| no, it's not better to just punt on this issue and throw even
| more money at a greedy rent seeking middleman.
| solardev wrote:
| > It's amazing to me that people will just blow by this point
| while accepting corporate monopolization of what should be a
| public resource.
|
| I think it's more a matter of picking your battles. What are
| the things that our government does poorly, which should be
| handled better? Let's see... education, healthcare, science
| and arts funding, housing, wars, surveillance, immigration,
| highways and bridges, Amtrak...
|
| It's hard enough to improve (for example) local transit,
| petitioning a dozen people across 1-3 agencies for a few tens
| or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of improvements.
| But to try to get Congress to implement a system affecting
| thousands of sites across all 50 states, across the NPS,
| USFS, USFWS, BLM, Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps of
| Engineers, etc... where do you even start with such a thing?
| Of all the letter, protests, petitions, voicemails, public
| meetings, etc. I've experienced, I've never once received a
| meaningful reply (much less actual positive change) from any
| politician higher than city-level. Our governments are just
| not set up to be responsive to regular citizens. You have to
| have a shit ton of money or power to matter at all.
|
| When even organized nonprofits with established lobbies
| struggle with this -- a lot -- what is the average citizen
| supposed to do? Our lack of meaningful representation is a
| major systemic flaw of our so-called democracy, not something
| some rando on HN can single-handedly solve (unless, maybe,
| you're one of the major tech CEOs on here... hey Vercel or
| Cloudflare, wanna help us make a better reservation system
| and forever earn public gratitude? lol)
|
| > It's better that the people who do this are punished.
| Either with criminal charges or with the removal of their
| ability to bid for future government contracts.
|
| Is it that black and white? Recreation.gov isn't the failure
| that (say) Healthcare.gov or WhiteHouse.com (the petition
| site) was. In fact it works very well. And from the news
| article, apparently the lottery fees were supposed to pay for
| most of the website in lieu of an upfront fee (though there's
| some question about a questionable $120 million fee).
|
| In terms of government digital efforts, honestly, this is
| probably the best one I've ever seen. Can't remember the last
| time it broke or crashed, and I've made dozens of
| reservations through it smoothly. And the cost to me... maybe
| $20/year?
|
| > The government is a sucker client. They pay huge contracts,
| always on time, and never follow up after they get screwed.
|
| Agreed. Part of our election cycles and extreme partisanship
| politics =/ Day to day services get deprioritized vs hot-
| button issues.
|
| > And no, it's not better to just punt on this issue and
| throw even more money at a greedy rent seeking middleman.
|
| I think a reasonable fix would to be just renegotiate the
| fees and give a larger portion to the parks, while still
| trickling some % to the contractor. Maybe open it up to a
| bidding process. But frankly I think this contractor is doing
| a much better job than the government itself could. The feds
| are terrible at making functional websites. Obama started
| some efforts and Biden is continuing them (Login.gov, the TSA
| systems) but they're still not very seamless. It's just not a
| part of their culture. Maybe that will change in time, but
| until then, I'd rather have an expensive but functional
| service than some ideologically purer but unusable system.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| What's the solution, though? You're criticizing "accepting
| corporate monopolization of what should be a public
| resource," which is fair, but you're also ignoring the actual
| problem that we have a public resource that can only handle
| an amount of utilization that is less than demand. We need a
| system to allocate demand.
|
| The post you're responding to isn't saying these things are
| good, but it's taking the practical perspective that the
| current system is better than what existed before and
| probably better than what the government would produce
| itself.
|
| It's easy to say that we shouldn't accept involving
| corporations in this way, and it's easy to say bureaucratic
| waste/theft should be punished. I think most people here
| would agree with you in a theoretical perspective.
|
| The problem is that we have to deal with the constraints of
| the real world, which the parent post addresses and you
| ignore. I'd invite you not to ignore them and just criticize,
| and instead to propose a solution - what do you think is the
| right way to allocate usage of national parks and related
| service that does not involve private corporations and also
| avoids bureaucratic waste?
| jjav wrote:
| > Imagine if we had a similar system for the departments of
| motor vehicles... pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes
| online instead of hours at the local office. Who wouldn't pay
| for that if they could afford it?
|
| I can't tell if this is a reference to AAA or you're not aware
| of it? That's basically what the AAA membership gets you.
|
| But at least in California, the DMV these days directly
| supports doing all the common things online so I haven't had a
| AAA membership in a long time nor have I had to go in person to
| the DMV in a long time.
| solardev wrote:
| What AAA can and cannot do for you varies by state. I don't
| live in California (any longer).
| havnagiggle wrote:
| The emissions testing place near me charges over $10 fee for
| credit cards for renewing your tags, and cash is not accepted!
| It's outrageous, and the line is out the door to get renewals
| everyday. The number of government endorsed middleman scams is
| ridiculous.
| londons_explore wrote:
| A centralised system _should_ be cheaper.
|
| Instead of 50 states all having separate DMV offices, all too
| small for a decent website, now it is just one office double
| the size with a small web dev team. That should be
| substantially better _and_ cheaper.
|
| Same for the forest service.
| jonhohle wrote:
| > Imagine if we had a similar system for the departments of
| motor vehicles...
|
| So petition your state reps to do it. AZ provides tools for
| self-service for most common tasks. With the exception of
| buying a car out of state and wanting to move a vanity plate
| over a few years ago, I can't remember the last time I went to
| the DMV _. It helps that our licenses don't expire until we're
| 65, so until my kids need to get their license, I don't see a
| need to go back.
|
| _ My vanity plate - FREEBSD -required an appeal to get to begin
| with because their system flagged it as a drug reference (free
| based). I had to _mail_(!) an appeal letter. When I went to
| transfer it, it was reflagged and they couldn't even help me at
| the DMV, and instead of going through the appeal process again
| I just dropped it.
| solardev wrote:
| I don't think I've ever successfully petitioned anything from
| any government, local or state, much less federal. I've
| tried. Our governments don't seem to be set up to respond to
| your average constituents at all, just rich businesspeople
| and politicos.
|
| These days it's all about culture wars and inflation, and no
| representative cares about day to day services and
| infrastructure.
| sh1mmer wrote:
| It's seems like a pretty cynical take to say that simply having
| a modern, standard platform for national parks (or whatever gov
| service) necessitates that platform must be cost inefficient.
|
| I don't see how improving the status quo and asking/enforcing
| federal contractors charge reasonable prices should be mutually
| exclusive.
|
| Even if the contractual approach remained the same (Eg charge
| lottery fees and use that to pay Booz) presumably the point of
| this suit is to ensure that Booz are charging only charging a
| reasonable overhead for their services.
|
| If it turns out their overhead is unreasonable one could either
| scale the fees down, or scale down Booz's cut and give the rest
| to the specific parks for their own use.
| asdff wrote:
| Cost efficiency is like jumbo shrimp when it comes to
| government and you as the customer. OK, this website is now
| "profitable" charging x for y. Well, its not like Y was
| produced out of thin air beforehand. The taxpayer always
| pays. Its in the name. A system like this merely moves where
| the point of sale happens from one point in the stream to
| another. It's not any more profitable than what came before
| really, especially considering all this "profit" effectively
| is shot into the sun out of the system as it enters booze
| allens checkbooks instead of having it go back into the
| public purse.
| sh1mmer wrote:
| Surely it's a question of which tax payers. Is it the tax
| payers using national parks (and entering lotteries or
| making reservations) or all tax payers? Charging for
| service also allows non-tax payers to contribute too.
|
| I'm not saying I'm for either approach but I still the cost
| efficiency is orthogonal to how it's funded.
|
| If it were more transparent how much Booz were making, and
| how much web traffic, reservations, lottery entries, etc
| they were dealing with then the reasonable profit overhead
| for their work could be more easily be understood by the
| public.
| asdff wrote:
| > Surely it's a question of which tax payers. Is it the
| tax payers using national parks (and entering lotteries
| or making reservations) or all tax payers? Charging for
| service also allows non-tax payers to contribute too.
|
| The thing is they aren't contributing to anything but
| booze allen hamiltons bottom line. None of this money
| goes into the parks department. Them taking a "reasonable
| profit overhead" amounts to parasitic loss. There's no
| magic sauce with web development, plenty of people
| understand it. This can be done in house at cost just as
| easily as its done in booze allen hamilton's house.
| solardev wrote:
| As both a web dev and a parks lover... have you tried to
| use the agencies' own sites much? Even for a flagship
| park like Yosemite (https://www.nps.gov/yose/index.htm),
| it's hard to figure out how the different permits work.
| They're way down the page, requires going through several
| similar-sounding pages, all to no obvious next step. Even
| something as basic as having clear calls-to-action aren't
| there.
|
| And figuring out where to go in the park... what's the
| difference between Plan Your Visit and Things to Do and
| Places to See? Why is it so hard to get a cohesive map
| that shows not just where to sleep but also the best
| places to visit and the recommended driving/hiking
| routes? What's the difference between a standard map, a
| brochure map, a simple map, a park map, and a valley map?
| Why aren't road closures and other alerts reflected on
| the maps?
|
| Why doesn't the Fees page talk about permit or camping
| fees at all?
|
| Which areas of the park are reservation-only, which are
| permitted, which are first-come-first serve?
|
| These are just basic examples I pulled off one site. Most
| NP sites are like that. And remember this is for
| Yosemite, one of the country's (if not the world's) most
| visited tourist destinations, and they couldn't even do
| basic UX well. This isn't for a lack of knowledge (the
| on-the-ground rangers are awesome! talk to one next time
| before you venture forth!), but digital isn't a priority
| to them. It's not even an afterthought. It's more often
| than not "oh, I don't know how that works or who works on
| it or who pays for it".
|
| Before Recreation.gov and ReserveAmerica before it,
| digital efforts WERE often done in-house, to disastrous
| effect. Even now, you will usually find better visitor's
| guides and resources outside of official NPS sites, like
| on Alltrails or random blogs or "best of" lists.
|
| There is no magic sauce in web development, but it does
| take a particular type of agency to be able to make good
| pages with a focus on the end-user. Maybe to you and I
| such a site is relatively simple to set up. But that is
| NOT the NPS's strong suit at all, and it would be a
| forever uphill battle to convince their administrators
| and the Department of Interior and Congress to focus on
| usability. I doubt many of them have ever tried to book
| their own reservation.
|
| Many of their parks don't even run their own restaurants
| and lodging[1] (which any tourist destination usually
| would), but you expect them to do well running a multi-
| agency, multi-site, multi-rule booking system? It's just
| not practical given the current staffing and skillset.
|
| [1] If you think outsourcing to Booz is bad, yeesh, the
| hospitality concessionaires like Aramark are even worse.
| Talk about overpriced and poor quality =/
| asdff wrote:
| >There is no magic sauce in web development, but it does
| take a particular type of agency to be able to make good
| pages with a focus on the end-user. Maybe to you and I
| such a site is relatively simple to set up. But that is
| NOT the NPS's strong suit at all, and it would be a
| forever uphill battle to convince their administrators
| and the Department of Interior and Congress to focus on
| usability. I doubt many of them have ever tried to book
| their own reservation.
|
| This is exactly why the private option is just as bad as
| the apathetic public one: in the end they are the same
| end result of a less than optimal ui/ux because they come
| from the same underlying issue of an administration that
| prefers to either not deal with it appropriately or toss
| the hot potato to someone else to take the blame of not
| dealing with it appropriately.
|
| I still stand behind my stance that its not impossible to
| make a good website in house, and that bringing in
| outside profiteers is always a mistake compared to hiring
| those same exact project managers with those same exact
| visions for the website on an internal basis.
| solardev wrote:
| But in the end they are _not_ the same result.
| Recreation.gov is way better than what the agencies tried
| to do individually, in-house, before. This isn 't a
| hypothetical, it's the actual historical pathway we went
| through to arrive at this point. Our shitty public
| option, where it existed at all, was thankfully replaced
| by a much superior centralized public-private
| partnership.
|
| Those exact same project managers probably would never
| have wanted to work directly for the NPS to begin with,
| dealing with government clearances and pay scales and
| bureaucracies for what, maybe half to 70% of their
| private-sector pay? I'm currently job-hunting for a
| public-sector web dev job and it's not easy to jump
| through their hoops, and that's for someone who's
| purposely seeking them out. Would a less civically-minded
| PM even bother?
|
| Good web development isn't just about code, but largely
| culture, a sort of user-focused product culture that's
| hard enough to find in tech proper, harder still in
| government. Congress doesn't even THINK about these
| issues, much less try to put out good requirements for
| them. It's easier for them to sign a check (or a rent-
| seeking agreement) than to spin up what would basically
| amount to a new digital agency from scratch (which I
| actually think would be a great idea, like what the
| United States Digital Service is tasked with)... but that
| takes time to get off the ground. In the meantime
| Recreation.gov (and ReserveAmerica before it) have served
| the public well for the last decade or so, at the expense
| of some minor taxpayer dollars -- still much more bang
| for the buck than we get out of a typical war or panicked
| pandemic response, or housing Secret Service agents at
| private resorts or whatever.
|
| _If and when_ our government improves, then yes, we
| should in-house essential and basic services like web
| development. But our government doesn 't seem to be
| improving on that front, and efforts to push it forward
| (like a Green New Deal) faltered. The current
| administration did manage to push through a lot of
| infrastructure dollars, but it remains to be seen whether
| that'll pay off (and whether it can survive the next
| Republican administration). Fingers crossed... but until
| then, god damn it, let me have my easily reserved
| campsites, please, if only so I can get away once in a
| while without having to think about how shitty the
| government is!
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Experience with government sites tells me otherwise.
| asdff wrote:
| I use plenty of good government sites. I think pubmed is
| an example of how powerful a site can be when its
| designed purely for function versus advertising. You can
| do all sorts of interesting operations both in search and
| with an accompanying command line utility that directly
| interfaces with the database. There's probably a higher
| percentage of "bad" private sites than bad government
| sites imo.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I have never used a site built by the government that I
| would say is anywhere close to as good as recreation.gov
| asdff wrote:
| Yet here we are in a thread about how this website is
| facing lawsuits so I don't think its a great success.
| solardev wrote:
| I agree with you. I hope the suit results in either the
| elimination of the fees, or that a large portion (90%+) goes
| to the parks instead of the contractor.
| subsubzero wrote:
| As a somewhat heavy user of recreation.gov this suit really makes
| me happy. The cancellation fees are borderline insane - ex. a $25
| per day camping site fee that needs to be cancelled leads to a
| $10 fee per day, meaning that the fee is 40% of the initial
| reservation price.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Cancelation fees should be massive, it deprives use of the land
| if there's not enough time to find a new user. Our national
| parks are a limited resource, don't reserve and take away use
| from someone else if youre not going to use it.
| dc96 wrote:
| Cancellation fees should not be more than double the actual
| fee of booking. This highly incentivizes no-shows and the use
| of virtual credit/debit cards for the initial booking.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| If you don't get the fee for just no showing I definitely
| agree. But I really do strongly believe that there needs to
| be heavy disincentives for reserving space that you don't
| use. The lack of extra space is the whole reason this site
| was needed in the first place.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Right but if you charge a fee to cancel then you've just
| made the no-show problem worse. Who would voluntarily pay
| fee when you can just do... nothing?
| tedivm wrote:
| That's only true if the fee is greater than the paid
| cost, but the fee is only 40%. That means people still
| get back 60% of their money.
|
| To put it another way, they could pay a $40 fee or lose
| $100 by doing nothing. Most people would rather pay the
| fee and get their $60 back.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I once had to cancel a one night reservation. I was trying to
| do the right thing to open up the spot for someone else. But
| the cancellation fee was more than the actual reservation,
| meaning I would have to pay them to cancel. Ridiculous system.
| blueridge wrote:
| Yeah, likewise. I use the site almost weekly for timed-entry
| reservations to various trailheads and parks, especially during
| the Summer and Fall hiking season. Even after adding my
| national park pass when checking out, which removes the bulk of
| the reservation fee, there's always a $2 service fee on
| checkout. It adds up.
|
| Separate frustration: needing a timed-entry permit for
| everything. It used to be you could wake up, glance at the sky
| and check the weather and decide where you're going and how far
| you might want to go. Now you have to hover over the computer
| days in advance, or refresh at just the right time to book a
| spot because certain time windows for entry haven't been
| released on the website yet, and won't be available to book
| until the day prior at a specific time.
|
| And if the weather is bad on the day, you're probably out of
| luck for the next few days, and potentially the next week if
| you didn't think ahead and buy permits for any other days you
| might want to go.
|
| I gave up on trying to get camping reservations altogether.
| They were gone within minutes of release.
| subsubzero wrote:
| Regarding timed entry which I hate, this popped up in the
| pandemic and seem to have never left. Its like all
| spontaneity is being eliminated in every aspect of outdoor
| adventures(hikes, camping, etc). I don't really go to natl.
| parks anymore and have been looking for camping in natl
| forests and more remote areas where there are few people(but
| are father away). Maybe the answer is first come first serve
| for everything? Because whatever is happening now seems to be
| working for nobody.
| [deleted]
| honkycat wrote:
| I would love to go camping. I have some friends who are going
| over the 4th of July weekend. I was like: "WOW! How did you get a
| camp site??"
|
| "Oh, we reserved it... in December"
|
| Fucking WILD that these camp sites are selling out like miley
| cyrus tickets. Really annoying!
| atourgates wrote:
| I have no perspective on the legality, but this sounds like a
| corrupt contract.
|
| The details from the article that stand out to me:
|
| * The US Government paid nothing for Recreation.gov, and the site
| is instead funded by fees charged on the platform, that are
| passed through to the site's operator, Booz Allen
|
| * The amount generated by those fees and paid to Booz Allen is
| not publically disclosed.
|
| * There are times when government agencies (like the NPS) offer
| free tickets (aka, timed entry to popular national parks), and
| Booz Allen still tacks on a fee.
|
| * Similarly, when you enter a nonrefundable lottery for popular
| permits (climbing Mt. Whitney, rafting the Salmon, etc.) the $6
| fee you pay to enter doesn't go to, say, conservation efforts in
| those areas, but goes straight to Booz Allen.
|
| On princple, I don't mind user-fees being attached to some
| activities in public lands. But this payment structure seems
| designed to defraud the American public. Certainly, the
| contractor is providing value by delivering online reservation
| systems, and that costs money, but they should not be
| incentivized to charge fees that go to them, not the public
| lands.
|
| I hope the lawsuit succeeds in gaining class action status, and
| prevents other government websites from being structured this
| way.
| hnboredhn wrote:
| Agreed. In particular the fees paid to Booz Allen should be
| disclosed.
|
| Looking back earlier this year I paid $40 for two cave tours of
| a national park through the site. There are no listed fees. It
| is a reasonable price for the tour and the site was pretty easy
| to use, but now I am curious what the cut is for the park.
| Definitely am not against a private company getting paid to
| manage reservations but seems reasonable that the info is
| disclosed.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They aren't called Beltway Bandits for nothing, and Booz-Allen
| is one of the top firms in that arena. Their bread and butter
| is milking federal contracts for every penny they can.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Delaware north is another one of these corrupt companies
| milking taxpayers. They're not as bad I don't think but
| still...
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I do. If public funds used to acquire public land aren't enough
| to make it accessible to the public, that's fine. Just seal it
| off and cart anyone on it off to jail. It shouldn't be a
| playground for the rich, partially funded by the taxpayer.
| atourgates wrote:
| I think we're a long way from that right now.
|
| There are literally millions of places you can camp and
| recreated for free on public lands in the United States. When
| the fees do exist, they're for particularly popular areas
| (National Parks) or cost-intensive uses (campgrounds where
| you can plug in your RV or take a hot shower).
|
| Campground fees of between $5-30/night are hardly making
| public lands a "playground for the rich." Same for the $80
| (cheaper for seniors, and free for the disabled or veterans)
| annual pass that'll get you and your family into every
| National Park into the country, as well as any other
| federally managed public lands that charge an entry fee.
|
| There are certainly important issues[1] about equity in
| access to public lands, but we're pretty far from your
| "plaground for the rich" scenario.
|
| [1] https://www.tpl.org/our-mission/equity
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| You're talking about national parks, I'm concerned about
| Army Corps of Engineering areas designated for recreation.
| There is no way to guarantee access at this point. You have
| to buy the pass from recreation.gov, then show up, then
| find out the park is 'full'. I have no idea what this
| means, there are no published limits, and I am still a
| valid pass holder.
|
| The website is basically a scam because you can't enter if
| you don't have a pass. But buying a pass doesn't guarantee
| access. I can't make a reservation either, I have to get
| there in line (after buying the pass online) and hope I can
| get early enough before the park is 'full'. This basically
| means the park is off limits.
| lacker wrote:
| The nice thing about fees is that if the website doesn't work,
| then Booz Allen doesn't make any money. I know one local
| campsite that doesn't use recreation.gov; you have to call them
| to make a reservation. Often nobody picks up the phone. Another
| one you have to email them, and they might get back to you
| weeks later. Please, let Booz Allen have my $6 fee, in return
| for actually running a reservation service.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| Out of curiosity - What would be the difficulties in having
| government services like this be offered as "api-only" from the
| government's side, and allowing open competition for interfaces
| and other interaction?
|
| What difficulties would there be from the government's
| perspective, what issues would the companies experience when
| trying to create the interfaces and portals, and what issues
| would pop up for the users of the services?
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Because government services have to be accessible to everyone.
| An API is not "accessible" to most people.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This site was commissioned in the wake of the obamacare market
| roll out which was an absolute cluster fuck. The idea was
| basically "ok so it turns out we're completely incapable of
| building a website without it falling over once we turn it on,
| lets let the private sector do it and incentivize them to make
| it good by letting them charge a fee when people use it". So I
| guess the difficult is that whoever came up with this website
| didn't believe the government could deliver it. Also thad the
| benefit of the site being free in terms of upfront costs.
| lesuorac wrote:
| You would need to allocate taxes to do that and also taxes on
| maintenance.
|
| This solution didn't need any investment from the USG.
| sh1mmer wrote:
| I think this is conceptually a great idea, especially for
| viewing data.
|
| However as soon as you start asking people for money (for
| reservations) then it becomes a big fraud risk if the UI isn't
| on a known same domain (such as something.gov).
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