Park's transit plan makes sense
Within two years, Glacier National Park's most heavily used entrance is going to look quite different, and the change will be the better in the long run.
There will be new buses running about, in addition to the park's trademark red "jammer" buses, and they will be cycling through a highly visible transit center that will be located at the west entrance's "T" junction that sends vehicles either left to Apgar Village or right on the historic highway to Logan Pass and St. Mary.
The transit center will be a clearinghouse for information on destinations in and around Glacier, and it will provide a regular line-up of buses going to many of those destinations. The transit center is the focus of an effort to offset inconveniences caused by a long-planned reconstruction of Sun Road's alpine section. It is obviously intended to encourage visitors to park their cars and use the buses, with the side effect of reducing congestion on Sun Road while construction is under way.
The "mitigation" effort will help Glacier visitors, along with businesses that depend on the park, endure construction that could last as long as eight years. But we think it will do much more than that.
It could change the way people think about the park - and the way they access the park - from here on out. For decades, Sun Road has steadily attracted more vehicles and visitors, leading to more parking pullouts, bathrooms, and impacts to trails and other park facilities directly off the road. It's worked reasonably well so far. But simply funneling more and more people and cars across a single alpine highway for another few decades isn't the best direction for the park or its visitors.
Glacier can sustain more people, but not a relentless, creeping increase in the number of vehicles on Sun Road.
What's needed are choices. And an expanded transit system, augmented with user-friendly information on traffic delays and other park destinations, provides choices.
Certainly, visitors will still have the option of driving the road. But with the new system, they'll be able to easily choose whether it's better to take the bus in the morning, or maybe wait until the afternoon to drive themselves. They'll be able to more easily consider going to Two Medicine one day, saving the next for Sun Road.
Glacier's visitation would surely have dwindled if the park had barged ahead with a reconstruction project without providing choices. The transit system is just one element in nearly 10 years of community-based planning to rebuild Sun Road. We're hoping that the new road, and an improved way of using it, will last for decades to come.