Good views, bad customer service

There are places on the internet where you can find people with very strange opinions about what the National Parks are, and how they should be run.

Kaibab Journal is not one of those places.

Dennis Foster really understands Grand Canyon National Park. (Understanding the park is different from understanding Grand Canyon, which is beyond the ability of we mortals.) Dennis understands the Canyon as an attraction, as a preserved space, and as an economic system. He posted an essay this morning about a recent visit to Grand Canyon. Actually, it's about Bad Customer Service.

I'm one of few people who takes a default position against using mass transit systems in parks. I'm not saying there's never an appropriate place for a shuttle system or a light-rail line or whatever, but I've never seen a place where a mass transit system was a good idea. And I've run two in-park transit systems, so I know something about it.

Dennis:

“I think that woman wanted this bus, but she’s at the wrong stop.” So uttered the driver of the Grand Canyon “hiker express” shuttle as we passed by a woman and her serious looking backpack. It was 6 a.m., the traffic was very light, and her efforts to flag down this unmarked bus were in vain. At our next stop, the driver bolted off the bus and had a five minute cigarette break. Although it would have cut into his smoking time, picking up this hiker would only have taken about fifteen seconds.

First-rate customer service and mass transit cannot long co-exist. To be any use, mass transit must operate according to a strict schedule. You cannot hold up the entire system to wait 2 minutes for one last person to arrive. Shuttle systems might be said to have negative dynamic stability. On a busy day, getting 5 minutes behind can quickly cascade into a crisis. It's a beautiful day; ten minutes later, it's Night on Bald Mountain.

I know from experience that running a shuttle system in a national park instantly turns you into a soulless petty tyrant. When I said I've run two systems, I don't mean that I conceived the idea, weighed the options, worked out a plan with the Federal Highway Administration, set up partnership agreements with local transit districts, rolled out a massive PR campaign, discovered that the assumptions that made the shuttle system the best option were wrong, bought the wrong busses late, implemented the system anyway, drove visitation into the ground, and continued with the system regardless of its formidable limitations. I wasn't that guy. (Though he did get an award!)

I was the guy with the radio and the clipboard and 60 angry senior citizens who couldn't understand why I sent the shuttle away almost empty when they were all standing right there. (Numerous good reasons.) I was the guy who had to refuse to hold the shuttle an extra 2 minutes while the husband got back from the car with her camera. I was the guy who got to explain that the dogs-on-busses policy was changing hourly. I was the guy who got to stand there and make awkward small talk when the first shuttle never came back from lunch. I was the guy who got to watch the regional shuttles run day in and day out with never a rider on board, hemorrhaging money the whole time. I was the guy who got to explain why bad decisionmaking in an office somewhere forced them to get off the shuttle to hear an orientation, just to reembark 2 minutes later. I was the guy who got to collect $13.21 an hour to sometimes stand in the rain and do absolutely nothing.

Dennis wrote, "'Service' is a concept that is not well appreciated in the context of a collectivist state, which is what the National Park Service is creating at Grand Canyon." Service dies when exposed to mass transit, even on the smallest scale. The more these systems are introduced, the worse service must get. The more they become mandatory, the less I will go.