I strongly disagree. Prior to reservation systems, it was not uncommon to drive out to Glacier, say, only to find every camp site filled. Now you can be assured that you will have a site prior to taking the week off and hauling your family hours from home. Likewise, several popular western rivers became absolutely crushed with traffic. One year I floated 30 miles before I found a site (which was more than two regular days on that river). They needed a way to lottery or offer permits, and recreation.gov has performed better than what they used previously (though they're often gone within seconds of opening availability -- which converts first-come to a sort of lottery).
I think the solution to the empty camp sites problem is a stiff penalty for failing to release the site to others prior the reserved date. For instance, last year on the John Day they said if you didn't put in on the designated day, you'd lose your ability to pull a John Day permit the following year.
Ahh yes, the "I really want the fourth of july, but I can only book X months in advance. So I'll book a week early, and book the 27th of June through the 4th of july weekend. Then i'll wait months, and then pay the $7 fee to change my reservation, and drop the first week from my reservation."
Its very sad how common this is, and makes it very difficult to find spots out west in popular areas. It really doesn't help that my state (Oregon) has almost doubled in population the last 30 years, but added almost no new camping areas since the 70's.
What can one do? Popular, increase in population, only $7 to change … efficiency of market and public facilities … obviously increase supply. But given the growth and the price, demand follows …
May I suggest enjoy whatever you got and fight to increase more. Not a paradise USA but much better than other places in the world. Best wish and season greetings.
> Ahh yes, the "I really want the fourth of july, but I can only book X months in advance. So I'll book a week early, and book the 27th of June through the 4th of july weekend. Then i'll wait months, and then pay the $7 fee to change my reservation, and drop the first week from my reservation."
Seems like a reasonable solution to that would be allowing booking X days in advance where "days in advance" is measured by the last day of your reservation instead of your first. This would also advantage people who are okay with staying a shorter time, meaning that more people get to enjoy the park in total.
Obviously none of this solves the problem of there not being enough opportunities for everyone, but this would make things more equitable as a stopgap measure.
This still leaves an opening for scalpers who have no intention of actually going to the park, just charging people to use their reservation.
A different alternative would be to make those spaces an auction, and somebody can pay more to take over your reservation. At least then the park gets the money
No, it’s illegal to resell a reservation. I posted a joke scalper ad on Craigslist (forgot to take it down) for a national park reservation (this was right after they were introduced and I was salty about it) and they got a grand jury subpoena for my account info and investigated me for reselling government property. They didn’t charge me once they realized I didn’t do anything more than post and ad (and in protest at that), but scalping permits is highly illegal.
They actually check ID at many campgrounds and make sure it's the same person as the one reservation is made for. Generally they accept photo of reservation holder ID if (for example) you say that the person that reserved the campground will arrive later or got sick. Still pretty hard to impossible to scalp at scale - you can't change name in reservation, only cancel it (for fee).
They do not want to do auction because it will defeat purpose of camping be accessible to regular people. Outside of small number of highly popular campgrounds in prime season, you can book most campground in advance - very few campgrounds sells out in seconds.
This is the fallacious thinking that somehow market forces can be defeated at will. If they wanted camping to be accessible to regular (poor) people then they need to dole out those subsidies to them directly. If they sell permits below market rate then they are just randomly handing out subsidies.
I think there are better anti-scalper methods. It probably won’t be 100% effective, but making it hard to transfer permits can help prevent a secondary marketplace from forming.
I think the solution to the empty camp sites problem is a stiff penalty for failing to release the site to others prior the reserved date. For instance, last year on the John Day they said if you didn't put in on the designated day, you'd lose your ability to pull a John Day permit the following year.