In Yellowstone National Park, the transportation focus is on roads, not in providing more efficient ways to travel them.
With last week’s announcement of a $10 million federal grant to upgrade the park’s North Entrance, faster traffic flow through Gardiner is guaranteed, even though it won’t happen for a few years.
That news is already reaping additional rewards.
Earlier this week, the park announced that a civil engineering graduate student, Katrina Hecimovic, was awarded a National Park Foundation grant that will allow her to work for another year on the details of the newly approved entrance design.
Park spokesman Al Nash said he expects that more funds will be awarded to related projects now that the entrance is moving forward.
That’s what happened after improvements to the West Entrance in West Yellowstone were approved in 2004.
As improved gateways allow traffic to flow more easily into the park, they do little to ease congestion within. Like the old entrances, the aging roadways are suffering the effects of more traffic jams as increasing numbers of visitors stop to watch wildlife and slow the cars behind them.
That compounds the amount of car exhaust in the park that can contribute to poor visibility.
For each of the past two years, about 3.4 million visitors drove the park highways, up from 2.8 million at the turn of the century.
About 80 percent of the roads - about 185 miles - are in a structurally deficient state, because poor-quality road bases fail under the weight, speed and volume of modern traffic for which they were not designed, according to the National Park Service website.
Roads have either been recently repaired or reconstructed, or are scheduled for repair or reconstruction, including the resurfacing and widening of lanes and the addition of pullouts, Nash said.
“We’re dealing with an aging infrastructure so many roads were built without shoulders, one of the many things we now take for granted,” Nash said. “Pullouts really make a difference in traffic jams and flow.”
For the past few summers, crews worked on Lamar River Bridge on the northeast entrance road and the road between Canyon Village and Tower Junction. Much of the work is covered under a 20-year, $300 million Federal Lands Highway Program for the park.
Planning has begun on reconstruction between Norris and Mammoth, but the actual work is dependent on the funding coming through and is limited by a relatively short construction season, Nash said.
With so many cars already on the road and more to follow, it would seem that Yellowstone Park might consider following the lead of other national parks that have introduced mass-transit options.
Denali National Park led the trend, establishing its mandatory shuttle system in 1972.
The Grand Canyon National Park started an optional shuttle system in 1974 and then made it mandatory in 2008 after purchasing 29 compressed natural-gas-powered buses. The voluntary shuttle system was racking up 4.5 million visitor boardings each year.
When Zion National Park hit 2.4 million visitors in 1997, managers instituted a mandatory shuttle system to eliminate its traffic and parking problems. Private cars can tour the park only during off months.
Acadia, Bryce Canyon, Yosemite and Glacier national parks have shuttle routes but private vehicles are also allowed in the parks.
But Nash said Yellowstone is different than parks like Glacier, which has just one main road. For one thing, according to a past survey, a high percentage of visitors come in one of the park’s five gates and leave through another.
Yellowstone’s size, variety of visitors and multiple sites and gates make shuttle route design challenging, Nash said.
“There’s been discussion of mass transit in the park for a long time, but how big and complex a system would you have to devise to be effective? What about funding?” Nash said. “Our focus has been on infrastructure because that is something we can control.”
Laura Lundquist can be reached at 582-2638 or llundquist@dailychronicle.com. Follow her on Twitter at @llundquist.