Park Service Backs Off on Banning Cars in Yosemite

Yosemite Valley, the picturesque gash in the granite walls and domes of Yosemite National Park visited by more than 2 million people a year, will not be closed off to cars anytime soon, the National Park Service finally conceded Friday after nearly 10 years.

Despite pledges of a quieter, more peaceful Yosemite made in a 1980 master plan, park officials said in a new report that it will not be feasible before sometime next century--if ever--to ban private cars from the narrow, 4,000-foot elevation valley.

And besides, the report says, conservation groups may wish for a less motorized environment in the valley but most visitors don’t.

“Most people prefer the convenience and scheduling flexibility offered by a private automobile,” the report said.

Conservation groups that poured years of work into the 1980 master plan--which also contained vows to cut overnight accommodations and remove most buildings from the valley--had grown skeptical over the years that the more revolutionary changes would ever take place.

Even so, the report Friday was called a serious blow. “It appears to me they are not dedicated to the goals of the master plan,” said Patricia Schifferle, regional director in San Francisco of the Wilderness Society, one of the groups that hailed the 1980 plan.

In its 1980 plan, the National Park Service proclaimed as its vision making Yosemite Valley, the most visited area of the park, “less congested, less developed and more attuned to the uncluttered, inspirational natural beauty and rhythms that visitors anticipate.”

Most of the provisions--including a drastic cut in auto use--were to be in place by next year, the 100th anniversary of the national park northeast of Fresno in a patch of the Sierra Nevada range carved by glaciers into splendorous rock formations.

But, said acting Supt. B.J. Griffin Friday, “It was just too ambitious.”

1,500 Workers

At times in summer, Yosemite Valley takes on the look of a small city. Nearly 1,500 workers live on the valley floor and walk paths with views of the park’s famous cliffs and waterfalls. The local Lion’s Club meets for lunch twice a month at the Ahwahnee Hotel, the Rotary every Tuesday at Yosemite Lodge. There are regular sessions of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, and a dentist who sees patients five days a week.

The valley environment has turned somewhat more natural in recent years, the report said. There is less dust, litter and smoke; the east end of the valley has been closed to cars; about 18% of overnight visitors come in tour buses rather than cars, and more people are riding shuttle buses after they arrive, the Park Service said.

But requiring visitors to park their cars at distant lots and ride buses or some other form of transit into the valley, as suggested by the 1980 plan, is not realistic in the foreseeable future, the report said. It would cost too much and there are problems of logistics.

For instance, the report calculates that buses would have to depart every minute from satellite parking lots to accommodate the park’s current 3.3 million annual visitors. The slow-climbing buses would add to congestion on Highway 140, the “middle route” into the park from Mariposa.

In addition, the narrow road would need to be widened by cantilevering the pavement over the Merced River canyon. “The financial cost and environmental impact would be major,” the report concluded.

Ultimately, the report said, lessening the impact of traffic may be a long way off.

“Future technologies may help us reach a more sweeping solution of the private automobile dilemma,” the report says. “Perhaps a light-rail system, operated by 21st-Century technologies such as electromagnetic conduction, could make it physically and economically feasible” to virtually ban cars from the valley.

Reducing Overnight Stays

Another major goal of the 1980 plan was to reduce by 17% the number of people who could stay overnight in the valley. Some were to be accommodated by new lodging in the Wawona and White Wolf sections of the park, though the plan foresaw forcing about 10% to leave the park altogether.

But the valley has remained steady at about 1,770 sleeping accommodations, ranging in price and comfort from the rustic clubbiness of the Ahwahnee Hotel to tent cabins--pieces of canvas slung over a wood frame under the fir trees.

Increasing demand to sleep in the park has forced park officials to decide not to immediately take lodging units out of service, and lack of water has made it impossible to build new units at Wawona, the report said.

Costs have also gotten in the way of plans to relocate workers--most of them employees of Yosemite Park & Curry Co., a private firm that runs lodgings and restaurants--and the park’s administrative headquarters to the El Portal area west of the valley.

But the report Friday said that no new growth is anticipated in the valley.

“We will continue to hold the line . . . by not increasing the number of overnight accommodations, parking spaces or operational structures in Yosemite Valley,” the report said.

Public comments on the new report are being taken by the park service until Oct. 6.