A good start, with long road ahead

After nearly 10 years of talking, inspecting, planning and producing documents, the National Park Service is finally embarking on a concerted reconstruction of Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park.

While Sun Road construction has been ongoing, here and there, for decades, the park is now pursuing an intensive rebuild of the upper, "alpine" stretch of road that has been neglected since the road was officially dedicated in 1933.

The project gets under way this year, as prescribed in a beefy environmental impact statement and rehabilitation plan that took years to develop.

And there couldn't be a better start to the project than a construction project that's actually far from Logan Pass. Site preparation work has begun for a new transit center at Apgar, which is an important component of making the construction much easier to bear for tourists and locals alike.

The reconstruction project is expected to carry on for six to eight years, maybe longer, and it is guaranteed to provide plenty of traffic delays. The transit center, linked with a similar expanded transportation hub at the other end of the 50-mile highway, is the hardware for an expanded transit system that will provide regular shuttle service along Sun Road, and to other destinations around the park.

The idea is to provide park visitors with economical choices for transportation in the park. In doing so, it's expected that traffic congestion will be reduced.

Visitors can surely continue to drive their own vehicles over Sun Road. But our bet is that it will start to look like the more troublesome option for many visitors.

Why drive your own car on Sun Road, enduring traffic delays during peak construction hours, when you can get where you need to go and have a good view of the park doing it? Why deal with the hassle of finding a parking spot at Logan Pass? Already, there are summer days when parking is hard to come by at the pass.

A nifty aspect of the transit center is that it will be a hub for information as well as transportation. Real-time information on traffic delays and road conditions will be available, allowing visitors to pick and choose the best destinations and times for departure.

Enhanced transportation is formally part of an overall plan aimed at mitigating the impacts of construction on visitors, and as such it is considered a temporary service. However, park officials have speculated that it could easily become a permanent, popular option for visitors.

It is a forward-looking improvement for Glacier that follows the lead of transportation improvements at other busy national parks, such as Yosemite. It is an improvement that simply makes sense.