Man, I may be in the minority here, but I find recreation.gov to be one of the very few excellent government websites. We use it every summer for whitewater rafting and camping reservations. You can disagree with how permits/reservations are offered (e.g., lottery, first-come, etc.), but none of those decisions are made by BAH. They were given a task and, unlike so many government contractors, did it very well and relatively rapidly. The fee structure can be changed, but whatever the magic was, I wish it were repeated throughout government at every level.
I think the biggest issue with recreation.gov is that so very many people are desperate to use public lands. Population levels in the western US have exploded in the last twenty years and we've developed almost no additional recreation opportunities. For so long as that's true, the scarcity and price problems are only going to increase. But at least we have a well-functioning website with which to tackle the problem.
> Population levels in the western US have exploded in the last twenty years and we've developed almost no additional recreation opportunities.
There are a lot of great places for hiking and camping. The problem is that everyone wants to go to "the best" places, so you end up with a lot of people competing for a permit for Mt. Whitney rather than go for a similar alternative like Mt. Langley.
Keep telling enough people about Mt. Langley and you'll find the same problem.
Social media has in my opinion turned this into a shit show. I've done a lot of hiking and camping over the years, and all it takes is enough reviews and "influencers" to talk about some beautiful natural place and seemingly overnight you'll have hoards of people rushing to the view to get their selfie then immediately leave.
It's maddening because these kinds of visitors just generate a lot of traffic to fulfill their shallow objective of collecting a selfie. They largely don't care about what's become of the experience of actually spending time there, because they don't value the experience. It's just getting a photo/video for their $fb_insta_tiktok_whatevers_hot then get back on the road for the next place on the list. At most they're annoyed by delays. It was better when these people stuck to the theme parks.
This is true for a lot of things like restaurants, but hiking is one of the few areas where I don't think this is the case. People don't just casually decide to summit the tallest mountain in the contiguous US. Everyone there has likely trained on lesser known trails. The thing is, there is only one Whitney, but there are a couple dozen Langley's, and hundreds of even lesser known hikes of similar rigor. If all these become saturated, that's also good because that means Americans wouldn't be so fat!
It's only really a downside for the casuals who will go on Google and hit up one of the top 5 results on Tripadvisor.
As long as it's not not top-ranking or there's a barrier to entry then it will be limited.
Ultimately this is just the new hyper-culture we live in where leisure is now available to tons of people thanks to economics, combined with population growth. The hobbyists who are dedicated will always find new high quality options... just like restaurants/bars/fashion/etc.
Which is probably why having a more liberal system to develop recreational places for the more...casual/friendly audience could be a good thing. At least for getting people to enjoy the outdoors in peace and get out of traffic.
I find this discussion quite interesting. From a German perspective there's almost infinite amount of space in the US for hiking, compared to Germany. You find a lot of great trail in Germany, but if you go to Neuschwanstein (AKA the disney castle) you will find huge American and Chinese tour groups. But most other trails are perfectly fine. I can't imagine with the wide selection in the
US to have any problem if you're not going to one of the top 5 search results.
You get a lot of tourists in the US at the top parks as well. It's gotten so bad, many national parks are requiring reservations to get in, something they've never done before.
yeah, there’s some truth to what you’re saying. for years more and more people and culture type scenes have very intentionally “gone dark”
the best places to eat haven’t been on any food app “best of” lists for years.
they haven’t had features written in local foodie sites for years.
all of that shit has been gamed for years by marketing firms.
i mean, does anybody go yell out to the world when they find the best breakfast (and certainly not brunch) in town anymore? hell no. and this thought process isn’t limited to restaurants.
while the restaurants at the top of those lists or in the foodie review sections are of course edible, they’re basically like the Imagine Dragons (or nickelback or peter frampton or whatever mid band from your music generation) of restaurants.
for years and years a lot of bands who absolutely could play clubs have been opting to do DIY basement concert tours with only word of mouth advertising. this has been happening in more and more in all kinds of different scenes, for years.
some of the best new bands i’ve heard in the last few years don’t even use their social media accounts, they sit locked or completely unused.
i know for absolute certain that a tremendous amount of people don’t scream their culture likes out to the world anymore—and for good reason. consciously gone dark, back to word of mouth.
my aunt and i were talking at thanksgiving, she mentioned this is how her and her friends used to do raves—gatekeep it to word of mouth only, if you leaked it, you would lose access to the next party.
> fulfill their shallow objective of collecting a selfie
And then you wrote two more paragraph of judgemental trash to gatekeep how people are supposed to experience views, as if the new generation families and their circles of friends aren't fragmented and use the technology to close the distance.
Yeah, if you ask me, it's pretty legit to take a selfie when you reach a goal, particularly when it's something ultra-scenic like the summit of a mountain!
It's not the selfie taking that's the problem, it's the showing up just to take a selfie and promptly leaving.
When that escalates into a flow of people arriving and immediately departing just to take selfies it's now become a sort of thoroughfare and the natural environment is entirely disrupted in the interests of giving everyone their own bespoke copy of the same view.
At that point you may as well just pave the trail and install a Starbucks at the overlook.
I was talking to a distant cousin in Europe about hiking and how here in BC, you can (with some effort) go up in the forest and be completely isolated from civilization. Heck, you might even lose cell service! He mentioned how he was so frustrated when he'd go on ambitious hikes, feel pretty "alone with nature" and then, at the summit.. there's a pub. There are a couple mountain summits here like that (e.g. Grouse Mountain) but luckily quite a bit of reasonably-"untouched" stuff.
That said, as time goes on you have to go further and further out to experience that "untouched" nature, and I don't see that slowing down anytime soon. The spread of humans is seemingly inevitable, thus the seeking of selfies isn't really a noteworthy aspect. IMO it's a "drop in the bucket" compared to stuff like hyper-available trail map apps/websites with ratings and comments and up-to-the-minute video clips from fellow hikers/offroaders reporting conditions of every possible trail in existence. Stuff that wasn't even known to anyone suddenly becomes the hot new thing overnight because someone added it to one of those apps and called it "the region's best-hidden gem".
and how long do you have to watch the same scenery before you can be classed as not a problem?
besides, the problem is the hoarders that want to take hours watching from the few good spot, preventing access to anyone else because they don't "enjoy it" if they don't transform a spot place into a whole experiencial journey
That's a good point actually. I hiked 20km recently and got to a very scenic waterfall, but not only were my photos of this momentous occasion full of some people who were having lunch with their group right by the waterfall, but also of course I could not access the spot they were at (since they were taking up the whole plateau/rock that acted as a nice plaform). We hung around, drank some water, messed around on the radio, but those people were there before we arrived and stayed after we left. With all that considered, obviously the reality is there are just lots of people who want to see the same cool stuff -- I don't think one can reasonably argue it's "selfie-takers" nor "hoarders", since it's quite subjective what amount of time or experiential indulgence happens to be the optimal acceptable level.
This takes a huge toll on local backcountry/backpacking/canoeing/adventure firms too.
One of my companies’ clients is an almost 30-year old business with a team of almost 15 guides. Each one of them has more than a decade of experience, they’re all Red Cross certified at First Aid, and they hold a large collection of industry specific credentials.
Business was booming for them. Then someone setup shop looking to make a quick buck. The prices are about half, but they bring huge groups out to dangerous spots with no safety equipment and no safety briefings. There have been serious close calls that their group has created with my client’s tour groups, doing stupid things like throwing rocks off areas that are actively being used below by climbers and such.
Nah. Their business has grown almost logarithmically over the past few years, even during the pandemic. (Edit: in my original comment my wording suggested their business as has stagnated or plateaued; it hasn’t, but they’re having to fight harder for non-repeat/new clients.)
The problem is SEO and people who see the price difference and don’t know any better.
Repelling down a rock face into a canyon without a helmet? Darwin will sort that segment of the market out fairly quickly, unfortunately.
I don't have the time to look up the URL right now, but you and the GP of this comment should look up the essay on "locust and grasshopper economies"—once customers all have equalized and optimal information access, the best deals of the old days of information asymmetry are no longer feasible.
I don't think it's wrong to say that a care for environmentalism, ecology, and conservation are largely lost on the types of 'The Great Outdoors(TM)' social media influencers mentioned here.
the best part of national parks: exploring them. Pick one, go. If it's a national park it's good. I checked a list for the best to worst. The worst is the gateway arch. That's still worth a trip, great museum, beautiful grounds, and a crazy building.
I'm glad it works for you but man I am peeved that they instituted it in the katahdin woods and waters national monument area of the east branch of the penobscot in maine. People have been just heading down that waterway on trips since time immemorial and it's generally not a problem finding a site, but if it's particularly busy you would pull up and ask someone if they don't mind sharing. I've never turned a person down and I never will, but also I've never paid for a campsite on a river. I feel like paying to book a site just changes the dynamic of a shared waterway so much.
ahepp is correct, there is Baxter State Park which -- is actually not quite a state park and is instead administered as a quasi-independent concern that adheres to the goals of the original land grant to the state, which is to provide an accessible wilderness area to the people of Maine -- and there is katahdin woods and waters national monument which falls under the purview of the national park service. The katahdin woods and waters national monument is the result of the founder of Burts Bees buying up swaths of privately owned land over the years via a corporation and then ultimately donating that land to the national park service. While this seems like a good thing in general it's complicated by Mainers somewhat unique relationship to recreation on private land and the concept up here of "traditional use" versus a kind of chain reaction of regulated formal use practices that were triggered by the national monument designation.
The two parks border each other in areas and share some waterways.
Also to clarify Mainers have to reserve and pay for camping spots in Baxter, it just costs less for us. Day use is free. It's a very popular and beautiful place. In my opinion Baxter is the crown jewel of Maine and I'm happy for all of the tourists to fight it out over Acadia.
Katahdin is truly a hidden gem. The crowning knife's edge traverse is till date the most rewarding hike of my life, and that's counting more towering west coast mountains.
I kinda love how inconvenient it was to get there. Really felt like it filtered out the typical tourist or even casual hikers.
I believe there is a distinction here between Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, and Baxter State Park. Last I was aware, the latter contains the mountain itself.
Agree here. I LOVE recreation.gov, it is so great. I just booked a site for August next year.
That isn't too say the fees shouldn't be better directed to public agencies. Still though, absolutely amazing site, great app, I'm happy to pay a little fee to BAH for it.
The site is great. This is still another example of sending taxpayer dollars to private organizations because public offices aren't well funded enough to execute these things on their own.
I suspect it's part that and part that after healthcare.gov all the public employees are scared shitless of being held responsible for another incident like that, and believe (probably correctly) that outsourcing it means they can get at least most of the blame for failed projects to land with the external company.
It was even better when you just picked up the free permit on the way into the park. Its not like your saving any time, because that site is basically just a reservation system, you should still (and usually have to) stop at the ranger station and get the actual permit, check-in and sign various things, and hear various lectures and assure that the area is safe/etc due to weather/etc.
Plus, I'm not even sure it is helping with the reservation problem, as more than once i've found myself in a camping/etc area that is 100% booked and 50% empty.
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.
How did it work if you show up at the park and the whole campsite is full?
As parks get busier, it seems like permits are pretty much the only fair and realistic path forward. I loved being able to drive off and show up, but it’s also nice to be able to plan with confidence that I will have a spot.
I think there are solutions to the fully booked / empty sites problem. Charge a substantial fee if you no show. Give away infilled sites using your preferred method, after 5 pm. Etc.
I'm fairly certain that the reservations system results in the parks being more overrun. There are other variables as well, but being able to be assured that your going to get your camp site before you arrive has everyone and their brother booking the popular places.
The fact that you might arrive and not get that perfect spot serves to discourage some number of people. And many of them aren't prepared to find alternatives, or sleep in the dirt lot next to the ranger station. Which is the kind of thing that used to happen on those popular weekends at the popular sites. It frankly was never a problem for most people because they had already acknowledged to themselves that they might not get a spot, and had a backup plan. So for the first ~30 years or so of my life camping, I never made a reservation. Simply showed up and took what was available. Usually early if I thought it was going to be busy.
I can't ever remember not getting a spot, even as recently as ~6-7 years ago when I took the kids to yellowstone (with a plan for camping down the road if I couldn't get a spot in the park directly). And you know what, outside of the first day when we actually went to the alternate campground because it was late when we arrived, I didn't have a problem showing up the next day at the reservations desk and getting spots for the next 4 nights. And this was still in the summer when school was out.
The volume climbed first and then reservation systems were adopted. National parks expend considerable effort to track visits (it’s like their KPI) and it has been climbing for years, reaching unmanageable levels at many parks earlier in this century. Zion closed the canyon to cars in 2000, Acadia before that. The rangers were telling me it was probably only a few years away for the main road in Glacier.
It is still possible to drive up for camping at parks though. People cancel reservations all the time, creating “hidden” capacity that can only be accessed if you are there that day. But yeah, you better have a backup plan. Quite a few national parks have national forest campgrounds nearby, which are less busy, less developed, and often do not even take reservations.
There isn't any doubt that visitation rates have been up. I'm sure instituting formal reservation systems "helped" at the places that actually needed them, but this is a case that you can no longer get reservations at the parks which are also the least visited in the year following the reservation system being implemented, which seems suspect.
So, maybe its just social media/etc driving the problem, but it could also be that people can search the entire inventory and are like "hey I can't get a reservation at X, but we could go to Y instead since they have a site free" Vs actually having to pick up the phone and call a half dozen reservation desks adding friction to the system.
I guess my objection to characterizing this as a problem, is that it's the public's land held in trust for them. It would destroy the integrity of the system to not make it as discoverable and accessible as possible, within the bounds of maintaining the natural character of the land.
I have some sympathy for people who knew places off-the-beaten-path that now have more competition for a spot, but if the land really is public land, I don't see how it's ethical to keep it hard to find and hard to use. Fundamentally, doesn't a trustee have a duty to beneficiaries?
If you want a spot that's less accessible to others (and thus less crowded), there are still a lot of options. Finding such a spot might involve hiking a bit farther, visiting during the week, or dealing with harsher weather. But I really do think fairness, and thus the long term future of the system depend on the government doing its best to make it easy to find and access these places.
The 50% empty problem is due to being required to reserve months in advance. I cannot tell you how a given date will be impacted 6 months into my future, I can plan but shit happens.
It’s a nightmare for booking timed entry reservations. Rocky Mountain National Park opens reservations on the 1st of each summer month for the upcoming month and the site is just slammed. You click a reservation time, spin spin spin, then error.
It’s honestly infuriating when you really need to get 2 or 3 days of reservations before 8am for long hikes so you know, you don’t get killed by lightning, and the website just screws you over.
I’d love to FOIA their analytics data and find out how many times users get errored out after selecting a time slot.
The head of Colorado’s energy agency literally almost died this summer because he couldn’t get an early enough reservation. This stuff actually is life and death.
I booked the 5-7am slot at RMNP every week this summer and had no problems, including July 4.
If you're doing anything that's life and death, you arrive before 5am anyway. The accident you reference mentioned that he knew it was a lazy choice:
> This summer the park continued a timed-entry system it launched in 2021. The program requires visitors to schedule and reserve windows of time to enter the park. Toor said he wanted to start earlier but was only able to secure an 8 a.m. entry reservation. Feduschak and Gaines, who ascended a much more technical route, entered the park before the timed entry system starts at 5 a.m.
> “Eight was a late start, but we didn’t quite have the oomph to get in before the 5 a.m. cutoff,” Toor said. “Maybe we just need to suck it up and get there before 5 a.m.”
I’m glad you didn’t have any problems getting reservations. That wasn’t my experience. Fwiw, I mainly fly fish. I need to be in by 8am so I can hike to a high lake and get 3-4 hrs of fishing before the storm clouds roll in. It’s a different use case because it’s not helpful to me to be there crazy early, unlike climbers and through hikers who, sure, can start as early as they want. I kind of do need timed entry to work. And it just doesn’t. But good for you and your good fortune. I guess I should just be luckier or drop fly fishing. Sucks to be me, amiright?
The issue is that the site falls over under load. Or seems to, hence my point about getting their analytics data via a FOIA request. They probably need to use Cloudflare’s queue. But what incentive do they have? They’re selling out every reservation and getting every $2 fee they can. It doesn’t matter if the user experience is unpredictable and capricious.
Considering there is more federal land out west, it seems like there's no real issue. The east has the same or higher population with significantly smaller federal land.
Recreation.gov truly was a massive step in the right direction at the time of its release, but the total lack of oversight of Booz Allen Hamilton's revenue plan just cast such a pallor over the whole thing.
I'm supportive of an experienced team of developers working on this problem, and I don't even care if it's BAH who's paying them. Especially since Reserve America (the predecessor) was so hilaribad.
It's just truly deplorable that someone in the contracting process for the Feds heard "no cost to the government to build this" and didn't think "ok, cost to whom?"
It is sad if our baseline standard of Government is so low that this is what we want.
Like saying your prefer private security, that you pay for via city entry tolls to police because they are friendlier and the company that hires them is more efficient than the worlds worst police departments.
Of course it's sad. That doesn't make it wrong. The government is not good at building websites, outsourcing is the best way for them to do it until proven otherwise.
The article answers it's own question. On the website developed for Obamacare:
> The government had spent $400 million over four years - more time than it took the U.S. to enter and win World War II - and yet, the dozens of contractors couldn’t set up a website to take sign-ups.
So the answer to the headline question (and also the broader problem) is: because the government probably can't develop the project successfully in-house.
This is not a particularly American problem. Every few years I read about some super costly government IT disaster here in the Netherlands. I'm sure locals from most other countries will have similar stories to share. So the broader question would be: what makes governments apparently unable to get big IT projects done right? (I'm aware that there is a big selection/reporting bias in the disaster stories.)
According to the article, Booz Allen got a 10 year contract. What would it take, when it expires, for the BLM to develop and run this successfully in-house?
- Government jobs don't pay well relative to the private sector, especially in software, so the government talent pool is lower quality than industry.
- For most government activities, government essentially has a monopoly on their implementation, e.g. infrastructure building. So people don't have as much of a comparison to know how good or badly government is doing. With software, people use government software and use privately developed software and the difference is obvious.
- Software, perhaps even more than many endeavors, benefits from having a single decision-maker in charge of the project who has a clear vision of what needs to be done and strong conviction on how to do it. Design-by-committee is not a great way to design good software. Most government projects wind up being some form of design-by-committee, either implicitly or explicitly. Even when the government has software built by private contractors, the requirements are written by committee, the contractors chosen by committee, etc. Very few of the best of anything is designed by committee, but the effects are much more obvious with software than say, a park.
Healthcare.gov was farmed out to well-connected contractors, much like most other similar boondoggles (SLS, F-34, Bradley fighting vehicle, delayed road projects, etc).
It says a lot more about corrupt and inefficient procurement (e.g. cost-plus) than it does about rank-and-file government employees. Using many contractors in many different congressional districts, all of whom have little incentive to deliver on time and on budget, or cooperate effectively with each other.
Fundamentally you're talking about the problem I alluded to in the 3rd point: Software projects work best with a single (or small group of closely knit) decision-makers at the top who bear ultimate responsibility for the implementation of the project.
The problem with governmental design-by-committee is that it spreads out the responsibility such that the failure of the project does not fall on any individual or small group.
The lack of concentrated responsibility breeds an environment that incentivizes grift rather than delivering value.
If the iPhone bombed, it was going to be Steve Jobs' fault. He had final say in all design decisions. If Healthcare.gov bombed... whose head rolled? Excerpt from the wiki article of Todd Park, CTO in the Obama administration:
'''
The initial version of HealthCare.gov, which was deployed on July 1, 2010, was built in 90 days by Park and his team at HHS. The first HealthCare.gov was cited by the Kaiser Family Foundation as one of the early highlights in the implementation of the healthcare reform implementation progress. HealthCare.gov was also the first website ever "demoed" by a sitting president
The following two versions, from the relaunch of the front end in May 2013 to the badly flawed marketplace that went live in October 2013, were developed by contractors and overseen by officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, outside of his purview within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. When the extent of the problems with Healthcare.gov became clear, Park was tasked by President Obama to work on a "trauma team" that addressed the "technological disaster". Park, along with Jeffrey Zients, led the "tech surge" that ultimately repaired Healthcare.gov over the winter, eventually fixing the marketplace sufficiently to enable millions of Americans to find plans and purchase health insurance.
'''
How many of those unnamed officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services got fired for a multi-billion dollar boondoggle? The reason bureaucracies (both government and private) love process, documentation, committees, etc., is because the primary goal of any bureaucracy, far and above its nominal mission, is to continue existing, and a primary part of continuing to exist is to avoid blame for anything. Delegating decision making to committees and process is a key way to avoid blame.
"Who is responsible for this mess?"
"Nobody is responsible, we followed the process. But don't worry, we've started the process of forming a committee to update our process manual to prevent this mess in the future."
Is your claim here that corporations are able to correctly assign responsibility for major failures? Why do you think this? There are so many ways to deflect blame for your failures onto others while taking full credit for successes you had nothing to do with in the private sector.
Not exactly -- my claim is the the most successful organizations (both governmental and private) have high alignment between power and responsibility. This produces good incentives.
Bureaucracies (both governmental and private) tend towards poor alignment for the reasons I outlined.
Most mature companies eventually become bureaucracies, a process I like to refer to as "becoming IBM". Big tech companies (e.g. Google, Amazon) are well on their way to becoming IBM, and much of the dysfunction is exactly due to your point about deflecting blame and taking credit for successes.
So the distinction is not between government vs private, but rather bureaucracy vs non-bureaucracy. Many governments, such as the US, do tend to be highly bureaucratic -- much more so than e.g. IBM.
I feel it still says something about government employees because one can pretty much take it as a given that the standard employee pool is basically incapable of building relatively basic e-commerce websites.
Well yeah, what do you expect when Congress and the GSA sets pay for pay for developers at levels far below the private sector? I've worked for two different federal agencies in the past, and both were more efficient and lower BS than most private-sector jobs I've worked at. This wasn't IT or development, of course.
It's just taken as a truism that government is always inefficient and bureaucratic, but the average ossified corporation such as Google is wildly inefficient and bureaucratic just the same.
They also aren't necessarily that bad to interact with. I'd much rather go to the DMV than interact with Comcast.
The standard government employee is a project manager whose main job is overseeing contractor work. Funding cycles make it nearly impossible to hire in house staff to actually do work, and there is firm political opposition to the federal government doing anything on its own.
I've known some people who did contract work for the DoD like how you describe. They reported to DoD employees and were otherwise indistinguishable from actual DoD employes. However, there was some company that did their W2s, and took a cut almost as large as their salaries.
Being someone who just happened into a government job for my first one out of college that holds true in my experience. No good employee stayed in the job more than two years and most only one before they got so sick of the politics and bike shedding.
The government gets good employees it just loses them all very quickly when it fails to compensate them as well as provide them with meaningful work.
Another thing to consider is that the fundamental goal of most software is to automate tasks that are done by humans. Having this development take place inside the organization already doing those tasks is going to be met with hostility, and will likely cause projects to settle into non-optimal solutions that typically look identical to the clunky workflows they are replacing, but with an electronic medium of exchange rather than a paper one.
>- Government jobs don't pay well relative to the private sector, especially in software, so the government talent pool is lower quality than industry.
If we're discussing the USA, sure. If we're discussing other countries this isn't always necessarily true, and as the person you responded to has noted, this happens worldwide.
That is just one of the three points I made (and I personally think the final point is the most salient here). Though I'm curious, do you know of any countries where government software jobs pay market rate? I would be interested to see if their government websites are decent.
I think government could offer software engineers the same thing it offers others: not the best pay, but stable employment with a good pension package and a predictable workload. Not for everyone, but it could certainly appeal to some people.
* According to the Standish Group’s Annual CHAOS 2020 report, 66% of technology projects (based on the analysis of 50,000 projects globally) end in partial or total failure. While larger projects are more prone to encountering challenges or failing altogether, even the smallest software projects fail one in ten times. Large projects are successful less than 10% of the time.
* Standish also found that 31% of US IT projects were canceled outright and the performance of 53% ‘was so worrying that they were challenged.’
* Research from McKinsey in 2020 found that 17% of large IT projects go so badly, they threaten the very existence of the company.
* BCG (2020) estimated that 70% of digital transformation efforts fall short of meeting targets. A 2020 CISQ report found the total cost of unsuccessful development projects among US firms is an estimated $260B, while the total cost of operational failures caused by poor quality software is estimated at $1.56 trillion.
I'm in the consulting world and I've been brought in at the tail end of multiple BILLION dollar boondoggle modernization efforts. These are fortune 100 companies that built their fortunes through acquisition and consolidation who have no idea how to steer their ship in any sort of effective way. In a lot of cases, we're cleaning up after other top 5 consulting firms who lead the client on while pissing away hundreds of millions of dollars. It turns out damn near everyone is bad at building large systems but only the government seems to be derided for it consistently.
I think there's a difference between "this product doesn't make money" and "this product does not work". Amazon's alexa is a decent product that is a failure because it doesn't make money. Most failed private IT projects are this. The government isn't trying to make money. Their failed products are in the "this product does not work" category.
Big IT projects fail. The US federal government for the most part only deals in big projects. There's more to it than that, but they're mostly details compared to this basic truth.
> So the broader question would be: what makes governments apparently unable to get big IT projects done right?
Signals intelligence people must be building some of the most powerful computer systems in the world. They also historically have innovated and led the industry in areas like crypto. How come they get it right but the rest of the civil service can’t?
The rest of the civil service seems almost entirely unable to get anything done in computing though. Signals intelligence in the UK and US seem to ship quite a lot of success, from all the history, leaks, and things you can physically see like Bumblehive. Definitely something they’re doing differently than the rest of the civil service.
Can somebody explain to me why this got upvoted so much even though the writer doesn't have a brain?
Booz Allen is not renting us a park, because they don't own it, hence they cannot rent it out. Booz Allen is running a website and we are paying them fees because that's the money they use to run the website. He quotes them as saying as much in the article.
Then he goes on to basically state he has no clue what they were paid to run the website, and yet the entire article claims that the fees are "junk", regardless of the fact that he has no evidence to support this.
Despite this, in the linked article on Booze's website it states: "With more than 45 million users in FY21, the site has generated more than $270 million in revenue for the federal government". Compare that to the 182 Million to be invested in Booze over 10 years (18.2 Million/year averaged).
It's not stated how payment takes place, but Booze's wording suggests that the government did not have to front the capital and instead Booze will recoup it over time, which takes the risk off the government of another $400M boondoggle.
Clearly the government is making more money than it is spending, which is what you want, rather than a botched government job spending $400 Million and having jack shit to show for it. Not only that, but Booze's site was completed in only a year, and was the first major government site made in the cloud. It has continued to expand and has not failed. This is an amazing achievement for government work.
Pay them your fees and stop whining, or we'll end up with the government failing to make a basic website for 10x the amount of taxpayer money. People love to whine when they have to personally pay a fee, but they don't care at all when their taxpayer dollars are flushed down the toilet in the millions to billions. Out of sight, out of mind.
> Booz Allen is not renting us a park, because they don't own it, hence they cannot rent it out.
If they are controlling access to it and if they are charging for the access, it evaluates to the same whatever the means of that control. Its a workaround for effecting privatization for things that cant be privatized.
Oh come on, contractors work at the direction of their contractees. Private companies also often contract out event staff and ticketing. Not because it's some conspiratorial workaround transfer of power -- because it is a specific problem with contractors who specialize in it.
The fact of the matter is that the BLM just simply isn't a software development organization.
I mostly agree with you, including the sentiment that people are often just being whiny assholes.
> Clearly the government is making more money than it is spending, which is what you want
I think it would be nice if our federal lands were supported by federal tax dollars instead of pay to use.
But that single point pales in comparison to the number of whiny assholes who absolutely refuse to acknowledge that the reservation systems exist to keep us from very obviously trampling and permanently ruining our treasured parks and lands.
I actually want a broadly fair reservation system for the various parks, even if the government has to spend a bit to get there.
Maybe the article is wrong and Booz is doing great, but from the various comments here talking about people abusing the reservation system, it doesn't sound like it.
As I understand it, the problem is not so much the revenue they made for the government. The issue is that they are making a much higher (and recurring) revenue that they keep for themselves, for running a website that the government may have paid, or that - as you say - paid for itself already.
It's the result of political initiatives to cut cost[0]. A contractor won't work for free. If congress won't give you the money to pay for it up front, you gotta work out a deal somehow. As it often plays out, 'lower taxes' often just results in the costs of some public need being shifted to some private industry.
The government got the website for “free” (no up front cost). Maybe once BA collects some amount of money the website cost up front the cost structure should shift to cover the ongoing maintenance rather than building the initial version
$18 million a year is pretty steep for an RNG serving 64 people a day. More importantly, maybe the government should not be trying to make a profit off national parks?
Well I personally believe that it should break even. As a US citizen I am a part owner of that land. I'm fine with paying cost of upkeep to use it, but as a public resource it should be not for profit. The goal of the government should not be a squeeze every penny it can out of citizens, simply because they can and have the Leverage.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "profit". If money made by the National Park Service goes back into park improvements, land purchases, better facilities, etc, that seems great. If the money goes back into the government's coffers and is used to pay for patriot missiles, that seems bad. The NPS, as a government organ, shouldn't be run on a profit basis for the sake of other government functions - I think that's the reasonable version of the not-for-profit view.
I literally just applied for the April 2023 lottery that this piece is talking about, after failing to win last month. While applying I consoled myself with the thought that all of my $9 entry fees will go to the park service. It really feels bad to find out that is not the case. I can't believe that there isn't even a split between the Park and Booz Allen on the fee...
There isn’t a split on the cost to run the site, so there’s not a split on the fees. I agree that the fees might be too high, but hard to quantify that, and the site absolutely is better than what the government would have come up with if they built it in house.
We have to remember that incentives matter. Good products are created when their creators are rewarded for them.
> paying $9 for a “Lottery Application Fee.” If you win, you get a permit, and pay a recreation fee of $7. The success rate for the lottery is between 4-10%
Booze Allen gets paid $90-225 per accepted hiker to run the lottery. The parks get $7 per accepted hiker. Something is wrong.
Last time I used the site I had to try repeatedly and fail due to shitty javascript issues, all so that I could pay a reservation fee to a private company for a reservation to enter Arches even though the slots were only 10% taken. I was already there at the park, I had an Annual Pass I paid for, there were plenty of slots.
I was still forced to struggle through the process and I vert annoyed that apparently the entire reason was that the NPS was contractually obligated to give Booz Allen their fees.
So I think that both "good product" and "well aligned incentives" are a bit of a stretch at best.
Slightly off topic, but I feel like there are so many conflicting parties involved with the US national parks system. On one hand, we have groups of people who want to preserve the land as much as possible. But often these same people have no problems building new roads and swanky new amenities like hotels and restaurants in the middle of these parks. Yellowstone has some of the most wild and rugged terrain in the lower 48, yet some parts of it feel like DisneyWorld.
Which is it? Do we actually care about having natural land we can all enjoy, or are we just trying to add a few extra billion in our national budget? It all just comes off like a huge grift and way to exploit the land.
Then there are parks like Glacier, home to some of the most stunning natural beauty in the country, right next to Tribal Land with some of the most rampant poverty in the country. Suburban families cruise around in their brand new Subarus, while eating $30 bison burgers. They barely notice indigenous people, and the results of the land exploitation, on the way out.
If you are trying to root out corruption and waste in the Federal Government I would suggest looking beyond the Park Service. They are asked to do a lot (more each year) with a very small budget (that does not keep pace with inflation or the amount of places they need to run). The park service needs to cater to a wide variety of people who expect different things from their recreation.
Personally I think that personal cars should be banned from all national parks. The roads are expensive to maintain, and a traffic jam to a giant parking lot ruins the park. Denali or Rocky Mountain National park have excellent shuttle services that really help thin the crowd. But some people really like to have their road trips, and having some handicap accessible sections is also important. The contradictions stem from the very nature of democratic compromise.
I recently finished a road trip that took me through 7 national parks, and it was interesting seeing the large degree of variation in amenities in various parks, and how that changed the experience.
By far, my favorite experiences were at parks that had minimal amenities, and far fewer people as a result. These places felt wild, and to me, that's how they should feel.
The ones that were equipped with paved walking paths, shuttle systems (looking at you, Zion), and top tier camping amenities (Bryce) were absolutely mobbed with people, making them feel like theme parks.
I'm all for ensuring parks are accessible for more people, and I'm sensitive to the fact that parks need routes that can be accessed via wheelchair, not everyone has physical strength for difficult unpaved paths, etc.
But to your point, the experience at those "Disney-ified" locations felt very...counterintuitive. Combine this with the huge rise in vandalism, rule breaking, and general destruction in many parks, and I can't help but feel that a slightly higher barrier to entry is a good thing.
If it's challenging (but achievable) to visit a location, I feel like there may more inherent respect by the folks who care enough to make sure they're prepared for the experience.
Lowering the bar too far has been detrimental, IMO.
But that’s kind of the point. Zion is built like an amusement park, so masses of people come. Now shuttles are necessary, and now it feels even more like an amusement park.
Many parks require you to take long hikes to see the most amazing scenery.
I think it’s fine for some parks to provide this level of accessibility, but I do hope it remains limited to a subset for this reason.
Zion is a zoo of people, but it's so freaking huge and gorgeous that the crowds don't diminish it, IMHO. I despise crowds but Zion is worthwhile anyway.
Rented bicycles at Zion, the shuttle will take you and your bike to the end of the park. We hiked and biked our way back across the day. (Am I the baddie?)
I almost did exactly this, and next time I’m there, I probably will!
No way I’m riding those shuttles again. Nothing quite shatters the peace and awe that comes with the scenery like a kid screaming and kicking non stop while his parents act helpless.
> The ones that were equipped with paved walking paths, shuttle systems (looking at you, Zion), and top tier camping amenities (Bryce) were absolutely mobbed with people, making them feel like theme parks.
I probably shouldn't spoil it, but ...
For Zion/Bryce/Arches, go off season. I went twice: Once was the week after Thanksgiving (weekdays), and the other was in mid-January. It's deserted and you have most of the park to yourself. In fact, during the January trip, we stayed at a Best Western near Zion, and myself and one other party were the only people in the whole hotel that night. I believe even the staff went home (literally no one at the reception - if you really, really needed someone you'd call and they would come).
Early December is probably better, because of less snow. By January a number of trails are closed because they're not going to clear the ice. But even then, it was worth it.
I love cold/snow, and the only thing I could think about as I was driving home is how glorious going back in a few months will be ;)
I got got the off peak experience at a couple of the parks I visited and it’s glorious. Not for everyone, but will definitely factor into future plans.
Cold for me is not an issue (unless we're talking about the -10F or colder kind), and in some cases it's a feature. I can't stand being boiling hot on a long hike, and going out in the winter can be just the antidote to that.
It's also a lot easier to tolerate when the reward is silence and solitude.
To your point, not every trail will be accessible in the cold, and that is certainly a factor. But most parks have trails that are perfectly hike-able in the winter, and one of my favorite recent hikes was a pre-dawn snowy hike to Dream Lake at RMNP. I was the only person up there, got to watch an incredible sunrise reflecting off of the recently frozen lake, and then enjoyed the best tasting coffee I've ever had.
Not for everyone, but can be an amazing experience.
It was not that cold right after Thanksgiving, except at higher elevations. My friend and I hiked amongst the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon in the sun. It was pleasant enough not to need a jacket.
But as I said, once snow falls, they'll either close a number of the trails (Bryce Canyon), or they'll keep them open but you'll be walking on ice (Arches).
I saw Arches only when there was ice, and it was still totally worth it!
We seem to have a very similar view on what makes our national parks great. I’ve been thinking about a little road trip to a few of them, would you mind sharing your favorites?
Canyonlands. This place is enormous, and the diversity of terrain is amazing. After visit Arches the day before and not loving it, I immediately fell in love with this place.
Rocky Mountain. I went just as the first snow was rolling in, and think this is a great place off season. Gets busy with better weather though from what I understand. YMMV.
Redwood. Not as wild, but great hikes in solitude and not crowded.
Olympic. The sheer scale of this place is incredible, and again the diversity is amazing.
I really wanted to go to Lassen Volcanic and North Cascades, which I believe will be similar, but weather and timing were not on my side.
I've been to just about every national park in the lower 48. Here's some of the less-well-known ones:
Great Basin has a good hike to the peak, a cave system with guided tours, a nice (summertime) campground, and hiking trails to a really impressive arch.
Mt Lassen has a bunch of hikes, geothermal activity, lakes for swimming, a bunch of campgrounds, and some low-frills cabins.
Arches is always way busier than Canyonlands, but there's also a ton of non-NP features around Moab that are even less trafficked. Natural Bridges National Monument is also great. The Notom-Bullfrom road in Capitol Reef is a beautiful drive, and the campground out there is no-amenity, low-traffic.
Sand Dunes, in Colorado, is super cool, with hundred-foot-high sand dunes, but probably only 1-2 days worth of stuff to do in the park itself.
But if you want beautiful scenery without a lot of people, skip the national parks and look for the national forests. (Or sites in the National Park System that aren't National Parks, like National Monuments etc).
This is a really good point re: National Monuments and Forests. I also found just driving the Pacific Coast highway north of LA county as far north as you can go a different but similarly spectacular experience to many of the parks, with good trailheads and stopping points at various state parks along the way. Obviously a much larger driving commitment, though.
It's something the NPS has struggled with from the beginning- there is a book called "Engineering Eden" that goes into just how 'controlled' Yellowstone is and how the objectives have changed over the last century.
You see a scene like this [1] and you wouldn't be blamed for thinking that its just some normal highway in the western US. Its actually inside Yellowstone; zoom in on the sign and you'll see that its the exit ramp to Old Faithful.
Do you preserve the land, completely removing humans from it, and only allow humans to marvel at it from satellites? How do you get the population to care for your lofty goals? Do you make it accessible to humans so they can enjoy nature? How do they get there if not via roads?
Taking this comment seriously I would actually really support a more walking centered park system. You are correct that a lot of most parks are situated very far from roads, but in a lot of parks the best places are close to the roads. Personally really dislike having a traffic jam in a natural park, or people demanding yet more parking spaces in Yosemite valley. The shuttle bus services that exist in several national parks are generally really nice. They ease up the footprint and maintenance costs of roads and parking lots. They make it easy to do some of the more interesting through hikes. Obviously I am not saying that we should scrap all the roads but I do think that emphasizing walking would be a good idea.
> It all just comes off like a huge grift and way to exploit the land.
Bingo. It comes off that way because it is that way. With centralized power comes centralized corruption...This article is another outrage piece. At best we can expect some token gesture as a response but in the end, the powerful & well connected get their way by cynically fixing the errors of their ways with some new form of corruption.
> They barely notice indigenous people, and the results of the land exploitation, on the way out.
Our ancestors were indigenous and at some point we became assimilated subjects. I'll give it to the Native American & Hawaiian cultures in remembering their heritage. If the public outrage is notable enough, I'll wager that Booz Allen will have some sort of Native American committee so they can claim that they care about the land & people.
How are most people going to enjoy (and therefore care about) this natural land without at least some roads, hotels and restaurants?
Even in designated wilderness areas, somebody has to build roads and cut trail in order for anyone to enjoy it and scientists to study the effects of conservation. I think it's a tough balance and we need lands all across the spectrum of development.
Roads? You walk, ride an MTB, or (especially for park service moving construction materials for trail maintenance) use horses.
Hotels? I hear they've developed this innovation known as a "tent". Thanks to space-age fabrics, you can be warm and dry with little more than a bag and some sticks.
Restaurants? Food is fuel, not a social activity. It's not that hard to carry your calories on your back. In many parks, if there aren't too many roads, hotels, and restaurants upstream, you can get drinkable water straight from the stream, or run it through a filter. If you don't have to carry water in, most parties can pack in enough calories in to go for a week or more.
You're not going to get octogenarians and the obese to the middle of Yellowstone or the peak of Denali, no, but that's OK.
So the obese, elderly and disabled should have no access to the national park system whatsoever? Those people get a say in how tax dollars are spent too.
I wasn't suggesting a cable car to the summit of Denali. Just consider that maybe a hotel in Yellowstone could have a purpose besides profiteering.
I attended the NASPD conference this last year (National Association of State Parks Directors). After a couple of us ex Vacasa / Nike / Amazon engineers heard from our local state that the industry is up for disruption we started working on product in our free time. After attending that conference they couldn't be more right.
Those running the parks hate their options, I don't see them as a crook here. The industry for park management software that fits the needs of a public land is stale. Fees for fees is normal. The process to become a vendor for a state is long and drawn out, and is riddled with red tape that was created in large part by the very same stale old vendors who've been in it the last 30 years.
After speaking with multiple states and now being in the proposal process for a number of them, hopefully we can be a step further in the right direction (think things like opening up 3rd party integrations, better bot prevention, etc).
Another thing I'd like to pass on from talking to a number of states including the national parks people: They are really trying to move in a more equitable direction when it comes to park access. They are very aware that many park experiences aren't as accessible (hard to get a reservation) to certain demographics and from my perspective they are making an effort to figure some of those things out.
Do you think part of that accessibility plan is more paved parkways too? My wife has a disability that makes walking on gravel substantially harder than paved road.
Selfishly I'd enjoy parks more if the had paved access roads, parking and parkways. One of the things I like about where I'm living right now is the Recreation district in the city made it a mission to pave parkways and everyone's better off for it.
I'm sorry about your wife, but I'm going to say that I (and quite a number of other people) are against paving public lands reserved for nature parks. I'm perfectly happy to support her using off road (powered even) bikes, wheelchairs and any other personal mobility technology that is invented or used.
But, parks are suppose to be nature, its widely accepted that what the national parks did in the early 1900's was a huge mistake, paving and placing lodges next to old faithful, the paved path in carsbad caverns (along with the cafeteria), the roads through glacier and nearly all of the other parks. The town in the middle of Yosimite valley. This was done to encourage people to "see the sights" and the results have been a disaster, not only to nature, but to the traffic and general destruction of the "sights to be seen". And IMHO paved paths are just another name for a vehicular road.
So the modern take on nature parks (vs recreational parks like you find in town, which have trails, baseball fields and swimming pools), is that the correct way to build them is to keep the cars on the borders, and build trails to the sights. Ideally single track, and most definitely permeable surface. Although, armoring, and other more natural construction methods tend to be fine as well. Most of the parks constructed since the 1970's (the few that exist) tend to follow this model. Visitors center near the road, along with the RV camping, improved camping sites, etc and the nature is accessed via natural surface trails on foot, bike or horse.
> For instance, as one camper noted, in just one lottery to hike Mount Whitney, more than 16,000 people applied, and only a third got in. Yet everyone paid the $6 registration fee, which means the gross income for that single location is over $100,000.
Wow, it's like those scummy all-pay auction sites you see advertised, where you can buy/win a TV for just $4.29. Incredible that this is allowed.
It sounds like there's still no answer as to whether Booz Allen was paid cash upfront to build the sites, and it is possible that the amount being paid is "fair" in some sense. But if they're making six-figures of profit on one lottery for Mount Whitney, that seems exceedingly unlikely.
>> For instance, as one camper noted, in just one lottery to hike Mount Whitney, more than 16,000 people applied, and only a third got in. Yet everyone paid the $6 registration fee, which means the gross income for that single location is over $100,000.
> Wow, it's like those scummy all-pay auction sites you see advertised, where you can buy/win a TV for just $4.29. Incredible that this is allowed.
My impression was that those sites use a much scummier model, in which whoever buys the last ticket wins. Tickets are cheap, but the priority system ("last guy wins") means people buy a large number of tickets.
A true lottery in which you buy a ticket for $6 and then either win or lose at random is a very different thing. You can't spend more than $6 on that.
recreation.gov is a .gov site. Which is supposed to mean it is owned by the government and not a private run site collecting fees for a for-profit defense contractor.
I previously had little issue with the fees because I assumed they went back to the parks due to the .gov domain. Now that I know it's just a private 3rd party collecting them and our parks and public lands are still underfunded is infuriating.
Yes. I've been booking back country camping and trail access for a couple of years now and at no time did I suspect the money was going anywhere other than the National Park Service and BLM to support the programs and sites. I never would have imagined significant amounts, in some cases the majority of funds collected at a .gov park service site was going to a for profit defense contractor. In fact the site states in places that fees go to support the parks. No where does it say fees go to support for profit defense contractors.
This is the new normal, since the 1980's or so when "tax cuts" the politicians can brag about, then require back door "tax increases" through fee harvesting, and public/private partnerships (another word which in practice is just corruption) took over.
Maybe instead of fee harvesting those that can afford it, we actually make "public" lands public instead of trying to keep out the riffraff via fees they can't afford. The federal Gov is more than capable of hiring a couple engineers and creating a reservations website that doesn't require paying $$ everytime you want to get a back country permit, which were free (and first come first served) for the first 100 years of a parks existence.
The insanity is, that at least here in TX, its frequently less expensive and just as nice to find one of the many ranches that have recreation structures setup and go there rather than the state parks. The price is about the same, with the bonus of actually paying the owners instead of some corporation shaving off their slice of the pie of what my parents and grandparents already paid for.
> trying to keep out the riffraff via fees they can't afford
The reservation system is exactly how the riff raff are able to use the park. You think poor people are going to spend a weekend or even a full week driving to a national park when they're not guaranteed a place to sleep or even the ability to enter the park? This system is much, much better for first time park goers. As more people experience the parks the reservation system becomes even more important to ensure they stay "wild".
> The federal Gov is more than capable of hiring a couple engineers and creating a reservations website
Empiricism says this is false. The government has created 0 good websites, let alone reservation websites, and plenty of bad ones.
My experience with recreation.gov reservations has been as soon as registration is available for the coming season people will reserve every weekend speculatively and just eat the reservation or cancellation cost if they decide not to go. It really sucks as you have to basically play the game yourself even if you are opposed to it.
Yeah, the article is objecting to a fee for applying for the lotteries, but without them there would be so many speculative entries in the system that things wouldn't work.
I'd prefer a system in which you get a certain number of tokens that you can use to bid on various things. Speculative entries would lower your chances of actually getting what you want and thus be discouraged.
The article isn't against the lottery fee. It's against BAH making more money on the lottery fee than the park ends up making from the people who win the lottery.
Yes, this is what is happening. I drive through campground and talk to the hosts and they say that they frequently have empty spots because people just did not cancel.
Essentially, BAH charges the US Federal Gov agencies nothing, with the assurance that the creation and upkeep of these portals will be funded by various fees that can be added at BAH discretion, so long as they hold a pro forma public feedback discussion.
They should have simply contracted it out for 843 million dollars and made everyone in the US pay for with federal taxes instead of charging 6$ to people actually using it.
Sarcasm aside there is probably at least some overhead that the money is going towards. Also amusing to read about public/private partnerships when currently one of the biggest social/political buzzwords to imply absolute evil is fascism.
> Sarcasm aside there is probably at least some overhead that the money is going towards.
And so what if there is? I can promise it’s not close to $9 of overhead, and if it is, that indicates a whole other level of problems to be rightly upset about.
I really want to know who was ultimately responsible for the green light on the governments behalf. I don’t mean the head of the agency. I mean the person or committee who was responsible for putting out the requirements and choosing the bid.
In a similar deal, I want to know who in the government gave a private company (Clear) the right to expedite the travel of people who pay the private company.
Especially when the government already setup a massive security agency called DHS/TSA and already had global entry/pre check programs in place.
This is a trending premium business model. Pay to avoid government regulation or for better services. It's the same with toll freeways here in Southern California. Even Disneyland now, you can pay to avoid the ride lines.
It's incredible because the business model also implies they will always sell an inferior product alongside the upgraded premium one. It's like running a restaurant where I sell grilled "cheese" for $5 and you pay me an extra $5 to use actual cheese instead of dogshit.
Re: Disneyland allowing you to pay to avoid lines, I remember visiting Universal Studios (Orlando) after Hurricane Charley in 2004. The lines were non-existent, but the fun part wasn't skipping the lines so much as the feeling of having the whole park to yourself. If they could find a way to offer that experience, I'd pay for it. I suspect VR might be one of the only ways to do it (and perhaps a rollercoaster in VR is just as good as the real experience, I don't know myself as I haven't messed around with VR). I'd feel like an asshole paying to skip lines that actual, real human beings were waiting in, but I don't doubt that plenty of people would have zero qualms about this.
> The lines were non-existent, but the fun part wasn't skipping the lines so much as the feeling of having the whole park to yourself. If they could find a way to offer that experience, I'd pay for it.
Yep! I grew up in San Jose, and back in the 1980s, each year the company my mom worked for rented out Great America for a day in September. It was pretty awesome being able to just go on any ride you wanted without waiting.
As I understand it, Clear is actually contracted with the airports, not the government. And they only handle the initial ID check, they don't allow you to skip entirely.
DHS doesn't build technology, their homegrown solution for verifying ID is hiring bodies to look at your ID with their eyeballs.
Building Clear with taxpayer dollars would have required outsourcing to a contractor anyway. And for what, to let rich people skip the line? Let them pay for their own system, and reduce the hiring burden for the TSA at the same time. Seems like a win-win.
... and in fact, CBP does have a biometric ID verification system, but it's for customs entry.
> And for what, to let rich people skip the line? Let them pay for their own system, and reduce the hiring burden for the TSA at the same time. Seems like a win-win.
Letting rich people skip the line is a loss.
Letting rich people opt out of the system poorer people have to use, reducing political support for having a properly functioning system for poor people is a loss.
Letting a private company profit from allowing people to “buy” back their time due to an underfunded government department is a loss.
It is losses all the way around unless you have an explicit goal of creating a more tiered society. All disregarding the notion that TSA/DHS is security theater and a jobs program at best, and a way to control the masses at worst.
I would have thought this kind of deal would have been struck at some point when people still thought of the internet as "novel" or a "fad" and therefore didn't scrutinize the situation too closely but no, this deal began in 2017.
> Jeff Bezos says that people will one day be born in space colonies and will take tourist trips to Earth “the way you visit Yellowstone National Park”.
"The reservation system is idiotic and predatory! What’s the point of having it if there are open time slots all throughout the day? If I’ve paid for the interagency pass why doesn’t it cover the “reservation fee”? And despite there being reservations parking was still full in all major areas. If the system doesn’t reduce crowds then it’s must only be there to nickel and dime us. Public lands should be accessible for the public to use, especially local residents. Yosemite National Park and Arches have now removed their reservation systems and they receive millions of more annual visitors and are much more remote and wild. This is a shameless cash grab and must be abolished. "
I've been using recreation.gov for years and had no idea. I assumed the money went directly to trail maintenance, fences, restrooms, hiring rangers, etc..
This fee structure creates a malignant incentive to bring more public land into the reservation system. Having to deal with reservations sucks and should only be a requirement when absolutely necessary. Most of the places I've been that required a reservation were mostly vacant.
Unpopular opinion: if you don't charge a fee to enter the permit lottery, people will stuff the lottery using bots. It is a shame the fee doesn't go to the park service, though.
I see two problems though: the bullshit fees going to a private getkeeper on government lands and demand that outpaces supply. Your concern only addresses the second.
I'd rather the park service charged 10x directly and made disposable income the gatekeeper, vs the current situation.
So charge a very high lottery fee that is refunded if you don't get a permit OR if you actually use the permit. If you don't cancel within X days - maybe a week - before your permit day, you lose the fee.
I am staying in a National Forest as I speak. I had to pay the $8 fee to reserve my spot for two nights. Yeah, it does not matter how long you are staying so staying one night DOUBLES my costs.
It used to be you would show up and just drop a check in the box and there was no fee involved. I hate what the internet did/ Because what also happens is that people reserve thee spots online and do not show up and do not cancel making the parks more crowded than they really are.
When an article like this so confidently (and incorrectly) declares that a scenic attraction is inside a National Park when it is not, I lose all faith and stop reading. If you don't know what type of government control The Wave is under, I don't believe I should be believing you.
Any company could bid on the contracts to make these sites, and more importantly, maintain them and provide services.
Most Silicon/tech companies don't do these contracts because they are not as profitable and simply doing usual tech work.
So while BAZ makes money on fees, it's most likely not because they're evil wizards - it's more likely because not many others capable of running such a project for the required length of time bid on it.
So, if you really think these things are somehow such a theft of money, go compete, do it vastly cheaper, hire your friends and other do-gooders, and see how it goes.
But in the end, you might find that articles like this simply promote outrage and not actual understanding of the how and why of projects like it.
Completely disagree here. See my comment in the main thread of this post. A startup could net anywhere from 200k/yr for a state park contract to 15m+/yr depending on the state. However, realistic cap on revenue with a healthy market share for just the park management / reservation management side is 55-75m annually.
We are actually competing but it's important to understand that companies like Booz Allen have fought (successfully much of the time) to have a number of qualifiers put in these RFP's that would prevent any start-up from being accepted. Things like "You need X years in this specific market for your proposal to be accepted". Obviously the only ones who can possibly have that are the existing vendors which virtually eliminates the possibility of fresh competition. We've successfully got a few states to change their requirements however, which is the first time that's been done in a quite some time.
The company I work for does exactly small and mid sized govt contracts, the vast majority won on bids with no shady input from us. There's tons of companies like us.
> So, if you really think these things are somehow such a theft of money, go compete, do it vastly cheaper, hire your friends and other do-gooders, and see how it goes.
Do you sincerely believe this is how it works? Just make your own software consultancy team and lobby the government to build their new campsite reservation system?
I wonder if there's space for a kind of "open source government contract bidder" where a coalition of open source volunteers could bid on government contracts that are about serving the public good. If they were about doing it at cost, they could undercut these people every time.
Recreation.gov feels like the kind of thing a bunch of engineers would've loved to build and run in their spare time if given the chance as long as server costs got paid for.
I don't think this has anything to do with open source. Booz Allen could've still charged all these fees, developed everything out in the open, MIT licensed it, and that wouldn't have changed anything about the fee structure.
In fact, from my understanding, recreation.gov is built on top of tons of open source software (they use docker on Kubernetes, react, etc).
Also "coalition of open source volunteers" sounds absolutely scary to me, government or not. Is there anything anywhere that runs this way? At some point, SOMEONE has to be accountable and pay the bills and receive the money.
It's only partly about the source, and mostly the fact that hosting and operating a web site is something developers and other IT people can do and don't mind doing.
"Is there anything anywhere that runs this way?"
Co-ops exist at all levels all over the place, and even outperform traditional commercial organizations so, yes.
A co-op is quite a different thing to a loose knit group of volunteers. I’d love to see co-ops picking up this sort of contract, but I do think it’s important people get paid for that work, and the contract is assigned to a specific organisation, otherwise you will eventually end up with a bunch of burnt out people keeping national infrastructure running for free.
I didn't see any such proposal that explicitly described a lack of organization. I assumed the actual implimemtation details were simply handwaved in a casual high level comment. Of course there would have to be some sort of structure.
"In 2017, consulting giant Booz Allen cut a deal with the government to extract junk fees from Americans who want to use Federal lands and waters for hunting or fishing."
Seems like a racket to charge money for hunting federal lands, when many of the lands have been purchased or maintained using the conservation/hunting excise tax on firearms and ammunition.
"Tyler Technologies was founded by Joseph F. McKinney in 1966 as Saturn Industries after buying three government companies from Ling-Temco-Vought."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Technologies
"This was a target procurement for us,” says Booz Allen’s Chief Innovation Officer Susan Penfield. “It represented the shift from Booz Allen’s management consulting heritage to the delivery of modern, large-scale digital platforms."
https://www.fastcompany.com/90666188/innovating-in-the-great...
BAH also provides Advana, the Hadoop / Spark platform that was initially developed to support the Pentagon's audit and is now the centerpiece of the Chief Digital and AI Office, so Ms. Penfield's quote above does seem consistent.
"Ticketmastered" is one heck of a verb! It honestly strikes fear into my heart to think what else might soon be "ticketmastered" in the future. Hopefully it at least affords opportunity to create a counter-resistance that champions "anti-tickemastering" legislation.
I understand why people would prefer user fees to nationally-distributed taxes. What rubs me the wrong way is the lottery application fees. Charging the people who visit a park is one thing. Charging people who want to visit a park, apply to do so on a govt website, and are denied, is another. If this was an account setup fee I might be able to understand. But charging it every time you throw your hat in the ring seems inefficient and exploitative.
It's probably an effective way to prevent bots (or even humans) from spamming the lottery if entry to the lottery was free or gated by a one-off fee. The exploitative part is mostly that these per-application fees are pocketed by a private company.
He says it’s “corrupt” but yet has access to all the data, working website and reservation system - he doesn’t know what “corrupt” really is or pretends not to.
so what there are fees so that government doesn’t need to pay or build any of it - I’d rather pay them than get charged more in taxes.
The normal state of news is that a story breaks and there are 300 near identical articles about it in 24 hours. Google News wouldn't have been successful if they hadn't developed a clustering algorithm that handles this.
Ordinary clustering algorithms don't work well for documents period in my experience and I am not sure if that's the right approach to topic identification. But if we're going to get past RSS readers having the same failing interface that has been failing since 1999 and get past the idea that social media is bad because "algorithms = bad" we need some algorithm to tame the many "me too" blog posts that come whenever a blog post breaks onto the front of HN.
Doctorow says "But there’s something we can do about this! The part of the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act that authorizes agencies to assess fees runs out in Oct 2023, and when Congress renews it, they could add an amendment to block Booz’s junk fees."
I read both the Doctorov and Stoller articles but did not seen any proof that Booz-Allen receives the addon fees. Has an audit of their books revealed this?
I think the biggest issue with recreation.gov is that so very many people are desperate to use public lands. Population levels in the western US have exploded in the last twenty years and we've developed almost no additional recreation opportunities. For so long as that's true, the scarcity and price problems are only going to increase. But at least we have a well-functioning website with which to tackle the problem.
There are a lot of great places for hiking and camping. The problem is that everyone wants to go to "the best" places, so you end up with a lot of people competing for a permit for Mt. Whitney rather than go for a similar alternative like Mt. Langley.
Social media has in my opinion turned this into a shit show. I've done a lot of hiking and camping over the years, and all it takes is enough reviews and "influencers" to talk about some beautiful natural place and seemingly overnight you'll have hoards of people rushing to the view to get their selfie then immediately leave.
It's maddening because these kinds of visitors just generate a lot of traffic to fulfill their shallow objective of collecting a selfie. They largely don't care about what's become of the experience of actually spending time there, because they don't value the experience. It's just getting a photo/video for their $fb_insta_tiktok_whatevers_hot then get back on the road for the next place on the list. At most they're annoyed by delays. It was better when these people stuck to the theme parks.
As long as it's not not top-ranking or there's a barrier to entry then it will be limited.
Ultimately this is just the new hyper-culture we live in where leisure is now available to tons of people thanks to economics, combined with population growth. The hobbyists who are dedicated will always find new high quality options... just like restaurants/bars/fashion/etc.
Which is probably why having a more liberal system to develop recreational places for the more...casual/friendly audience could be a good thing. At least for getting people to enjoy the outdoors in peace and get out of traffic.
the best places to eat haven’t been on any food app “best of” lists for years.
they haven’t had features written in local foodie sites for years.
all of that shit has been gamed for years by marketing firms.
i mean, does anybody go yell out to the world when they find the best breakfast (and certainly not brunch) in town anymore? hell no. and this thought process isn’t limited to restaurants.
while the restaurants at the top of those lists or in the foodie review sections are of course edible, they’re basically like the Imagine Dragons (or nickelback or peter frampton or whatever mid band from your music generation) of restaurants.
for years and years a lot of bands who absolutely could play clubs have been opting to do DIY basement concert tours with only word of mouth advertising. this has been happening in more and more in all kinds of different scenes, for years.
some of the best new bands i’ve heard in the last few years don’t even use their social media accounts, they sit locked or completely unused.
i know for absolute certain that a tremendous amount of people don’t scream their culture likes out to the world anymore—and for good reason. consciously gone dark, back to word of mouth.
my aunt and i were talking at thanksgiving, she mentioned this is how her and her friends used to do raves—gatekeep it to word of mouth only, if you leaked it, you would lose access to the next party.
> fulfill their shallow objective of collecting a selfie
And then you wrote two more paragraph of judgemental trash to gatekeep how people are supposed to experience views, as if the new generation families and their circles of friends aren't fragmented and use the technology to close the distance.
When that escalates into a flow of people arriving and immediately departing just to take selfies it's now become a sort of thoroughfare and the natural environment is entirely disrupted in the interests of giving everyone their own bespoke copy of the same view.
At that point you may as well just pave the trail and install a Starbucks at the overlook.
That said, as time goes on you have to go further and further out to experience that "untouched" nature, and I don't see that slowing down anytime soon. The spread of humans is seemingly inevitable, thus the seeking of selfies isn't really a noteworthy aspect. IMO it's a "drop in the bucket" compared to stuff like hyper-available trail map apps/websites with ratings and comments and up-to-the-minute video clips from fellow hikers/offroaders reporting conditions of every possible trail in existence. Stuff that wasn't even known to anyone suddenly becomes the hot new thing overnight because someone added it to one of those apps and called it "the region's best-hidden gem".
besides, the problem is the hoarders that want to take hours watching from the few good spot, preventing access to anyone else because they don't "enjoy it" if they don't transform a spot place into a whole experiencial journey
One of my companies’ clients is an almost 30-year old business with a team of almost 15 guides. Each one of them has more than a decade of experience, they’re all Red Cross certified at First Aid, and they hold a large collection of industry specific credentials.
Business was booming for them. Then someone setup shop looking to make a quick buck. The prices are about half, but they bring huge groups out to dangerous spots with no safety equipment and no safety briefings. There have been serious close calls that their group has created with my client’s tour groups, doing stupid things like throwing rocks off areas that are actively being used below by climbers and such.
The problem is SEO and people who see the price difference and don’t know any better.
Repelling down a rock face into a canyon without a helmet? Darwin will sort that segment of the market out fairly quickly, unfortunately.
conversely i think it's great we're seeing more people able to take advantage of what we all collectively own.
The two parks border each other in areas and share some waterways.
I kinda love how inconvenient it was to get there. Really felt like it filtered out the typical tourist or even casual hikers.
That isn't too say the fees shouldn't be better directed to public agencies. Still though, absolutely amazing site, great app, I'm happy to pay a little fee to BAH for it.
The site is great. This is still another example of sending taxpayer dollars to private organizations because public offices aren't well funded enough to execute these things on their own.
Plus, I'm not even sure it is helping with the reservation problem, as more than once i've found myself in a camping/etc area that is 100% booked and 50% empty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
As parks get busier, it seems like permits are pretty much the only fair and realistic path forward. I loved being able to drive off and show up, but it’s also nice to be able to plan with confidence that I will have a spot.
I think there are solutions to the fully booked / empty sites problem. Charge a substantial fee if you no show. Give away infilled sites using your preferred method, after 5 pm. Etc.
The fact that you might arrive and not get that perfect spot serves to discourage some number of people. And many of them aren't prepared to find alternatives, or sleep in the dirt lot next to the ranger station. Which is the kind of thing that used to happen on those popular weekends at the popular sites. It frankly was never a problem for most people because they had already acknowledged to themselves that they might not get a spot, and had a backup plan. So for the first ~30 years or so of my life camping, I never made a reservation. Simply showed up and took what was available. Usually early if I thought it was going to be busy.
I can't ever remember not getting a spot, even as recently as ~6-7 years ago when I took the kids to yellowstone (with a plan for camping down the road if I couldn't get a spot in the park directly). And you know what, outside of the first day when we actually went to the alternate campground because it was late when we arrived, I didn't have a problem showing up the next day at the reservations desk and getting spots for the next 4 nights. And this was still in the summer when school was out.
It is still possible to drive up for camping at parks though. People cancel reservations all the time, creating “hidden” capacity that can only be accessed if you are there that day. But yeah, you better have a backup plan. Quite a few national parks have national forest campgrounds nearby, which are less busy, less developed, and often do not even take reservations.
So, maybe its just social media/etc driving the problem, but it could also be that people can search the entire inventory and are like "hey I can't get a reservation at X, but we could go to Y instead since they have a site free" Vs actually having to pick up the phone and call a half dozen reservation desks adding friction to the system.
I have some sympathy for people who knew places off-the-beaten-path that now have more competition for a spot, but if the land really is public land, I don't see how it's ethical to keep it hard to find and hard to use. Fundamentally, doesn't a trustee have a duty to beneficiaries?
If you want a spot that's less accessible to others (and thus less crowded), there are still a lot of options. Finding such a spot might involve hiking a bit farther, visiting during the week, or dealing with harsher weather. But I really do think fairness, and thus the long term future of the system depend on the government doing its best to make it easy to find and access these places.
This is good.
> serves to discourage some number of people.
The is bad.
Sounds like the system is working well.
It’s honestly infuriating when you really need to get 2 or 3 days of reservations before 8am for long hikes so you know, you don’t get killed by lightning, and the website just screws you over.
I’d love to FOIA their analytics data and find out how many times users get errored out after selecting a time slot.
The head of Colorado’s energy agency literally almost died this summer because he couldn’t get an early enough reservation. This stuff actually is life and death.
If you're doing anything that's life and death, you arrive before 5am anyway. The accident you reference mentioned that he knew it was a lazy choice:
> This summer the park continued a timed-entry system it launched in 2021. The program requires visitors to schedule and reserve windows of time to enter the park. Toor said he wanted to start earlier but was only able to secure an 8 a.m. entry reservation. Feduschak and Gaines, who ascended a much more technical route, entered the park before the timed entry system starts at 5 a.m.
> “Eight was a late start, but we didn’t quite have the oomph to get in before the 5 a.m. cutoff,” Toor said. “Maybe we just need to suck it up and get there before 5 a.m.”
The issue is that the site falls over under load. Or seems to, hence my point about getting their analytics data via a FOIA request. They probably need to use Cloudflare’s queue. But what incentive do they have? They’re selling out every reservation and getting every $2 fee they can. It doesn’t matter if the user experience is unpredictable and capricious.
I'm supportive of an experienced team of developers working on this problem, and I don't even care if it's BAH who's paying them. Especially since Reserve America (the predecessor) was so hilaribad.
It's just truly deplorable that someone in the contracting process for the Feds heard "no cost to the government to build this" and didn't think "ok, cost to whom?"
More context in this 2018 article: https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/tools/camping-res...
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector...
Like saying your prefer private security, that you pay for via city entry tolls to police because they are friendlier and the company that hires them is more efficient than the worlds worst police departments.
The government identified that an existing system wasn’t working and replaced it with one that works great. Would you prefer that they didn’t…?
> The government had spent $400 million over four years - more time than it took the U.S. to enter and win World War II - and yet, the dozens of contractors couldn’t set up a website to take sign-ups.
So the answer to the headline question (and also the broader problem) is: because the government probably can't develop the project successfully in-house.
This is not a particularly American problem. Every few years I read about some super costly government IT disaster here in the Netherlands. I'm sure locals from most other countries will have similar stories to share. So the broader question would be: what makes governments apparently unable to get big IT projects done right? (I'm aware that there is a big selection/reporting bias in the disaster stories.)
According to the article, Booz Allen got a 10 year contract. What would it take, when it expires, for the BLM to develop and run this successfully in-house?
- Government jobs don't pay well relative to the private sector, especially in software, so the government talent pool is lower quality than industry.
- For most government activities, government essentially has a monopoly on their implementation, e.g. infrastructure building. So people don't have as much of a comparison to know how good or badly government is doing. With software, people use government software and use privately developed software and the difference is obvious.
- Software, perhaps even more than many endeavors, benefits from having a single decision-maker in charge of the project who has a clear vision of what needs to be done and strong conviction on how to do it. Design-by-committee is not a great way to design good software. Most government projects wind up being some form of design-by-committee, either implicitly or explicitly. Even when the government has software built by private contractors, the requirements are written by committee, the contractors chosen by committee, etc. Very few of the best of anything is designed by committee, but the effects are much more obvious with software than say, a park.
It says a lot more about corrupt and inefficient procurement (e.g. cost-plus) than it does about rank-and-file government employees. Using many contractors in many different congressional districts, all of whom have little incentive to deliver on time and on budget, or cooperate effectively with each other.
The problem with governmental design-by-committee is that it spreads out the responsibility such that the failure of the project does not fall on any individual or small group.
The lack of concentrated responsibility breeds an environment that incentivizes grift rather than delivering value.
If the iPhone bombed, it was going to be Steve Jobs' fault. He had final say in all design decisions. If Healthcare.gov bombed... whose head rolled? Excerpt from the wiki article of Todd Park, CTO in the Obama administration:
'''
The initial version of HealthCare.gov, which was deployed on July 1, 2010, was built in 90 days by Park and his team at HHS. The first HealthCare.gov was cited by the Kaiser Family Foundation as one of the early highlights in the implementation of the healthcare reform implementation progress. HealthCare.gov was also the first website ever "demoed" by a sitting president
The following two versions, from the relaunch of the front end in May 2013 to the badly flawed marketplace that went live in October 2013, were developed by contractors and overseen by officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, outside of his purview within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. When the extent of the problems with Healthcare.gov became clear, Park was tasked by President Obama to work on a "trauma team" that addressed the "technological disaster". Park, along with Jeffrey Zients, led the "tech surge" that ultimately repaired Healthcare.gov over the winter, eventually fixing the marketplace sufficiently to enable millions of Americans to find plans and purchase health insurance.
'''
How many of those unnamed officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services got fired for a multi-billion dollar boondoggle? The reason bureaucracies (both government and private) love process, documentation, committees, etc., is because the primary goal of any bureaucracy, far and above its nominal mission, is to continue existing, and a primary part of continuing to exist is to avoid blame for anything. Delegating decision making to committees and process is a key way to avoid blame.
"Who is responsible for this mess?"
"Nobody is responsible, we followed the process. But don't worry, we've started the process of forming a committee to update our process manual to prevent this mess in the future."
Is your claim here that corporations are able to correctly assign responsibility for major failures? Why do you think this? There are so many ways to deflect blame for your failures onto others while taking full credit for successes you had nothing to do with in the private sector.
Bureaucracies (both governmental and private) tend towards poor alignment for the reasons I outlined.
Most mature companies eventually become bureaucracies, a process I like to refer to as "becoming IBM". Big tech companies (e.g. Google, Amazon) are well on their way to becoming IBM, and much of the dysfunction is exactly due to your point about deflecting blame and taking credit for successes.
So the distinction is not between government vs private, but rather bureaucracy vs non-bureaucracy. Many governments, such as the US, do tend to be highly bureaucratic -- much more so than e.g. IBM.
It's just taken as a truism that government is always inefficient and bureaucratic, but the average ossified corporation such as Google is wildly inefficient and bureaucratic just the same.
They also aren't necessarily that bad to interact with. I'd much rather go to the DMV than interact with Comcast.
The government gets good employees it just loses them all very quickly when it fails to compensate them as well as provide them with meaningful work.
If we're discussing the USA, sure. If we're discussing other countries this isn't always necessarily true, and as the person you responded to has noted, this happens worldwide.
I wonder why this sentiment is never applied to big IT projects in the private sector.
https://faethcoaching.com/it-project-failure-rates-facts-and...
I'm in the consulting world and I've been brought in at the tail end of multiple BILLION dollar boondoggle modernization efforts. These are fortune 100 companies that built their fortunes through acquisition and consolidation who have no idea how to steer their ship in any sort of effective way. In a lot of cases, we're cleaning up after other top 5 consulting firms who lead the client on while pissing away hundreds of millions of dollars. It turns out damn near everyone is bad at building large systems but only the government seems to be derided for it consistently.Signals intelligence people must be building some of the most powerful computer systems in the world. They also historically have innovated and led the industry in areas like crypto. How come they get it right but the rest of the civil service can’t?
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/11/22/why-cant-the-do...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_budget
Booz Allen is not renting us a park, because they don't own it, hence they cannot rent it out. Booz Allen is running a website and we are paying them fees because that's the money they use to run the website. He quotes them as saying as much in the article.
Then he goes on to basically state he has no clue what they were paid to run the website, and yet the entire article claims that the fees are "junk", regardless of the fact that he has no evidence to support this.
Despite this, in the linked article on Booze's website it states: "With more than 45 million users in FY21, the site has generated more than $270 million in revenue for the federal government". Compare that to the 182 Million to be invested in Booze over 10 years (18.2 Million/year averaged).
It's not stated how payment takes place, but Booze's wording suggests that the government did not have to front the capital and instead Booze will recoup it over time, which takes the risk off the government of another $400M boondoggle.
Clearly the government is making more money than it is spending, which is what you want, rather than a botched government job spending $400 Million and having jack shit to show for it. Not only that, but Booze's site was completed in only a year, and was the first major government site made in the cloud. It has continued to expand and has not failed. This is an amazing achievement for government work.
Pay them your fees and stop whining, or we'll end up with the government failing to make a basic website for 10x the amount of taxpayer money. People love to whine when they have to personally pay a fee, but they don't care at all when their taxpayer dollars are flushed down the toilet in the millions to billions. Out of sight, out of mind.
If they are controlling access to it and if they are charging for the access, it evaluates to the same whatever the means of that control. Its a workaround for effecting privatization for things that cant be privatized.
The fact of the matter is that the BLM just simply isn't a software development organization.
> Clearly the government is making more money than it is spending, which is what you want
I think it would be nice if our federal lands were supported by federal tax dollars instead of pay to use.
But that single point pales in comparison to the number of whiny assholes who absolutely refuse to acknowledge that the reservation systems exist to keep us from very obviously trampling and permanently ruining our treasured parks and lands.
Maybe the article is wrong and Booz is doing great, but from the various comments here talking about people abusing the reservation system, it doesn't sound like it.
A better analogy would be something like parking enforcement. Run by TicketMaster.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_initiatives
We have to remember that incentives matter. Good products are created when their creators are rewarded for them.
Booze Allen gets paid $90-225 per accepted hiker to run the lottery. The parks get $7 per accepted hiker. Something is wrong.
I was still forced to struggle through the process and I vert annoyed that apparently the entire reason was that the NPS was contractually obligated to give Booz Allen their fees.
So I think that both "good product" and "well aligned incentives" are a bit of a stretch at best.
Which is it? Do we actually care about having natural land we can all enjoy, or are we just trying to add a few extra billion in our national budget? It all just comes off like a huge grift and way to exploit the land.
Then there are parks like Glacier, home to some of the most stunning natural beauty in the country, right next to Tribal Land with some of the most rampant poverty in the country. Suburban families cruise around in their brand new Subarus, while eating $30 bison burgers. They barely notice indigenous people, and the results of the land exploitation, on the way out.
Personally I think that personal cars should be banned from all national parks. The roads are expensive to maintain, and a traffic jam to a giant parking lot ruins the park. Denali or Rocky Mountain National park have excellent shuttle services that really help thin the crowd. But some people really like to have their road trips, and having some handicap accessible sections is also important. The contradictions stem from the very nature of democratic compromise.
By far, my favorite experiences were at parks that had minimal amenities, and far fewer people as a result. These places felt wild, and to me, that's how they should feel.
The ones that were equipped with paved walking paths, shuttle systems (looking at you, Zion), and top tier camping amenities (Bryce) were absolutely mobbed with people, making them feel like theme parks.
I'm all for ensuring parks are accessible for more people, and I'm sensitive to the fact that parks need routes that can be accessed via wheelchair, not everyone has physical strength for difficult unpaved paths, etc.
But to your point, the experience at those "Disney-ified" locations felt very...counterintuitive. Combine this with the huge rise in vandalism, rule breaking, and general destruction in many parks, and I can't help but feel that a slightly higher barrier to entry is a good thing.
If it's challenging (but achievable) to visit a location, I feel like there may more inherent respect by the folks who care enough to make sure they're prepared for the experience.
Lowering the bar too far has been detrimental, IMO.
Many parks require you to take long hikes to see the most amazing scenery.
I think it’s fine for some parks to provide this level of accessibility, but I do hope it remains limited to a subset for this reason.
No way I’m riding those shuttles again. Nothing quite shatters the peace and awe that comes with the scenery like a kid screaming and kicking non stop while his parents act helpless.
I probably shouldn't spoil it, but ...
For Zion/Bryce/Arches, go off season. I went twice: Once was the week after Thanksgiving (weekdays), and the other was in mid-January. It's deserted and you have most of the park to yourself. In fact, during the January trip, we stayed at a Best Western near Zion, and myself and one other party were the only people in the whole hotel that night. I believe even the staff went home (literally no one at the reception - if you really, really needed someone you'd call and they would come).
Early December is probably better, because of less snow. By January a number of trails are closed because they're not going to clear the ice. But even then, it was worth it.
I got got the off peak experience at a couple of the parks I visited and it’s glorious. Not for everyone, but will definitely factor into future plans.
I mean uhh, it sucked. Nothing to see here.
It's also a lot easier to tolerate when the reward is silence and solitude.
To your point, not every trail will be accessible in the cold, and that is certainly a factor. But most parks have trails that are perfectly hike-able in the winter, and one of my favorite recent hikes was a pre-dawn snowy hike to Dream Lake at RMNP. I was the only person up there, got to watch an incredible sunrise reflecting off of the recently frozen lake, and then enjoyed the best tasting coffee I've ever had.
Not for everyone, but can be an amazing experience.
But as I said, once snow falls, they'll either close a number of the trails (Bryce Canyon), or they'll keep them open but you'll be walking on ice (Arches).
I saw Arches only when there was ice, and it was still totally worth it!
Rocky Mountain. I went just as the first snow was rolling in, and think this is a great place off season. Gets busy with better weather though from what I understand. YMMV.
Redwood. Not as wild, but great hikes in solitude and not crowded.
Olympic. The sheer scale of this place is incredible, and again the diversity is amazing.
I really wanted to go to Lassen Volcanic and North Cascades, which I believe will be similar, but weather and timing were not on my side.
Great Basin has a good hike to the peak, a cave system with guided tours, a nice (summertime) campground, and hiking trails to a really impressive arch.
Mt Lassen has a bunch of hikes, geothermal activity, lakes for swimming, a bunch of campgrounds, and some low-frills cabins.
Arches is always way busier than Canyonlands, but there's also a ton of non-NP features around Moab that are even less trafficked. Natural Bridges National Monument is also great. The Notom-Bullfrom road in Capitol Reef is a beautiful drive, and the campground out there is no-amenity, low-traffic.
Sand Dunes, in Colorado, is super cool, with hundred-foot-high sand dunes, but probably only 1-2 days worth of stuff to do in the park itself.
But if you want beautiful scenery without a lot of people, skip the national parks and look for the national forests. (Or sites in the National Park System that aren't National Parks, like National Monuments etc).
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@44.4608402,-110.8437926,3a,75y,...
Bingo. It comes off that way because it is that way. With centralized power comes centralized corruption...This article is another outrage piece. At best we can expect some token gesture as a response but in the end, the powerful & well connected get their way by cynically fixing the errors of their ways with some new form of corruption.
> They barely notice indigenous people, and the results of the land exploitation, on the way out.
Our ancestors were indigenous and at some point we became assimilated subjects. I'll give it to the Native American & Hawaiian cultures in remembering their heritage. If the public outrage is notable enough, I'll wager that Booz Allen will have some sort of Native American committee so they can claim that they care about the land & people.
Even in designated wilderness areas, somebody has to build roads and cut trail in order for anyone to enjoy it and scientists to study the effects of conservation. I think it's a tough balance and we need lands all across the spectrum of development.
Hotels? I hear they've developed this innovation known as a "tent". Thanks to space-age fabrics, you can be warm and dry with little more than a bag and some sticks.
Restaurants? Food is fuel, not a social activity. It's not that hard to carry your calories on your back. In many parks, if there aren't too many roads, hotels, and restaurants upstream, you can get drinkable water straight from the stream, or run it through a filter. If you don't have to carry water in, most parties can pack in enough calories in to go for a week or more.
You're not going to get octogenarians and the obese to the middle of Yellowstone or the peak of Denali, no, but that's OK.
I wasn't suggesting a cable car to the summit of Denali. Just consider that maybe a hotel in Yellowstone could have a purpose besides profiteering.
Those running the parks hate their options, I don't see them as a crook here. The industry for park management software that fits the needs of a public land is stale. Fees for fees is normal. The process to become a vendor for a state is long and drawn out, and is riddled with red tape that was created in large part by the very same stale old vendors who've been in it the last 30 years.
After speaking with multiple states and now being in the proposal process for a number of them, hopefully we can be a step further in the right direction (think things like opening up 3rd party integrations, better bot prevention, etc).
Another thing I'd like to pass on from talking to a number of states including the national parks people: They are really trying to move in a more equitable direction when it comes to park access. They are very aware that many park experiences aren't as accessible (hard to get a reservation) to certain demographics and from my perspective they are making an effort to figure some of those things out.
Selfishly I'd enjoy parks more if the had paved access roads, parking and parkways. One of the things I like about where I'm living right now is the Recreation district in the city made it a mission to pave parkways and everyone's better off for it.
But, parks are suppose to be nature, its widely accepted that what the national parks did in the early 1900's was a huge mistake, paving and placing lodges next to old faithful, the paved path in carsbad caverns (along with the cafeteria), the roads through glacier and nearly all of the other parks. The town in the middle of Yosimite valley. This was done to encourage people to "see the sights" and the results have been a disaster, not only to nature, but to the traffic and general destruction of the "sights to be seen". And IMHO paved paths are just another name for a vehicular road.
So the modern take on nature parks (vs recreational parks like you find in town, which have trails, baseball fields and swimming pools), is that the correct way to build them is to keep the cars on the borders, and build trails to the sights. Ideally single track, and most definitely permeable surface. Although, armoring, and other more natural construction methods tend to be fine as well. Most of the parks constructed since the 1970's (the few that exist) tend to follow this model. Visitors center near the road, along with the RV camping, improved camping sites, etc and the nature is accessed via natural surface trails on foot, bike or horse.
Wow, it's like those scummy all-pay auction sites you see advertised, where you can buy/win a TV for just $4.29. Incredible that this is allowed.
It sounds like there's still no answer as to whether Booz Allen was paid cash upfront to build the sites, and it is possible that the amount being paid is "fair" in some sense. But if they're making six-figures of profit on one lottery for Mount Whitney, that seems exceedingly unlikely.
> Wow, it's like those scummy all-pay auction sites you see advertised, where you can buy/win a TV for just $4.29. Incredible that this is allowed.
My impression was that those sites use a much scummier model, in which whoever buys the last ticket wins. Tickets are cheap, but the priority system ("last guy wins") means people buy a large number of tickets.
A true lottery in which you buy a ticket for $6 and then either win or lose at random is a very different thing. You can't spend more than $6 on that.
... because the USPS also pays their contractors.
The government hires contractors for most things, but the projects are still owned and directed by the government.
Specifically: https://home.dotgov.gov/registration/requirements/#eligibili...
See also RFC 920: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc920 Section "Initial Set of Top Level Domains"
Maybe instead of fee harvesting those that can afford it, we actually make "public" lands public instead of trying to keep out the riffraff via fees they can't afford. The federal Gov is more than capable of hiring a couple engineers and creating a reservations website that doesn't require paying $$ everytime you want to get a back country permit, which were free (and first come first served) for the first 100 years of a parks existence.
The insanity is, that at least here in TX, its frequently less expensive and just as nice to find one of the many ranches that have recreation structures setup and go there rather than the state parks. The price is about the same, with the bonus of actually paying the owners instead of some corporation shaving off their slice of the pie of what my parents and grandparents already paid for.
The reservation system is exactly how the riff raff are able to use the park. You think poor people are going to spend a weekend or even a full week driving to a national park when they're not guaranteed a place to sleep or even the ability to enter the park? This system is much, much better for first time park goers. As more people experience the parks the reservation system becomes even more important to ensure they stay "wild".
> The federal Gov is more than capable of hiring a couple engineers and creating a reservations website
Empiricism says this is false. The government has created 0 good websites, let alone reservation websites, and plenty of bad ones.
I'd prefer a system in which you get a certain number of tokens that you can use to bid on various things. Speculative entries would lower your chances of actually getting what you want and thus be discouraged.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33789501
See also the explanation for the fees:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33794493
Essentially, BAH charges the US Federal Gov agencies nothing, with the assurance that the creation and upkeep of these portals will be funded by various fees that can be added at BAH discretion, so long as they hold a pro forma public feedback discussion.
Sarcasm aside there is probably at least some overhead that the money is going towards. Also amusing to read about public/private partnerships when currently one of the biggest social/political buzzwords to imply absolute evil is fascism.
And so what if there is? I can promise it’s not close to $9 of overhead, and if it is, that indicates a whole other level of problems to be rightly upset about.
Especially when the government already setup a massive security agency called DHS/TSA and already had global entry/pre check programs in place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_Secure
Re: Disneyland allowing you to pay to avoid lines, I remember visiting Universal Studios (Orlando) after Hurricane Charley in 2004. The lines were non-existent, but the fun part wasn't skipping the lines so much as the feeling of having the whole park to yourself. If they could find a way to offer that experience, I'd pay for it. I suspect VR might be one of the only ways to do it (and perhaps a rollercoaster in VR is just as good as the real experience, I don't know myself as I haven't messed around with VR). I'd feel like an asshole paying to skip lines that actual, real human beings were waiting in, but I don't doubt that plenty of people would have zero qualms about this.
You can. Companies regularly rent out entire amusement parks for a day for company events. Tech companies have been doing it in the Bay Area at Great America for a long time: https://www.cagreatamerica.com/groups/corporate-events/park-...
Of course, I'm sure it costs an amount much higher than you're willing to pay.
Why are people who can afford to pay an additional tax (not even to the government) getting to skip to the front of the line in a public facility?
Building Clear with taxpayer dollars would have required outsourcing to a contractor anyway. And for what, to let rich people skip the line? Let them pay for their own system, and reduce the hiring burden for the TSA at the same time. Seems like a win-win.
... and in fact, CBP does have a biometric ID verification system, but it's for customs entry.
Letting rich people skip the line is a loss.
Letting rich people opt out of the system poorer people have to use, reducing political support for having a properly functioning system for poor people is a loss.
Letting a private company profit from allowing people to “buy” back their time due to an underfunded government department is a loss.
It is losses all the way around unless you have an explicit goal of creating a more tiered society. All disregarding the notion that TSA/DHS is security theater and a jobs program at best, and a way to control the masses at worst.
How that got approved is disgusting.
Source: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/technology-main/2017/02/amid-...
My experience has been that's as far as some committees consider the matter.
https://www.independent.co.uk/space/bezos-space-colonies-ear... (https://archive.ph/z5DZm)
> Jeff Bezos says that people will one day be born in space colonies and will take tourist trips to Earth “the way you visit Yellowstone National Park”.
edit: Ah, here it is, October 2020, $15/car plus $2 reservation fee: https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/119660918/red-ro...
The recreation.gov entry ( https://www.recreation.gov/timed-entry/10075177 ) includes a 4 star review:
"The reservation system is idiotic and predatory! What’s the point of having it if there are open time slots all throughout the day? If I’ve paid for the interagency pass why doesn’t it cover the “reservation fee”? And despite there being reservations parking was still full in all major areas. If the system doesn’t reduce crowds then it’s must only be there to nickel and dime us. Public lands should be accessible for the public to use, especially local residents. Yosemite National Park and Arches have now removed their reservation systems and they receive millions of more annual visitors and are much more remote and wild. This is a shameless cash grab and must be abolished. "
What would have gotten them to 1 star?!!?
I'd rather the park service charged 10x directly and made disposable income the gatekeeper, vs the current situation.
It used to be you would show up and just drop a check in the box and there was no fee involved. I hate what the internet did/ Because what also happens is that people reserve thee spots online and do not show up and do not cancel making the parks more crowded than they really are.
Matt Stoller talks about it here >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69QRnm0shCc
Most Silicon/tech companies don't do these contracts because they are not as profitable and simply doing usual tech work.
So while BAZ makes money on fees, it's most likely not because they're evil wizards - it's more likely because not many others capable of running such a project for the required length of time bid on it.
So, if you really think these things are somehow such a theft of money, go compete, do it vastly cheaper, hire your friends and other do-gooders, and see how it goes.
But in the end, you might find that articles like this simply promote outrage and not actual understanding of the how and why of projects like it.
We are actually competing but it's important to understand that companies like Booz Allen have fought (successfully much of the time) to have a number of qualifiers put in these RFP's that would prevent any start-up from being accepted. Things like "You need X years in this specific market for your proposal to be accepted". Obviously the only ones who can possibly have that are the existing vendors which virtually eliminates the possibility of fresh competition. We've successfully got a few states to change their requirements however, which is the first time that's been done in a quite some time.
So yeah, it's possible.
Do you sincerely believe this is how it works? Just make your own software consultancy team and lobby the government to build their new campsite reservation system?
What in your experience tells you it's not possible? Do you read solicitations? Make proposals for govt projects?
Recreation.gov feels like the kind of thing a bunch of engineers would've loved to build and run in their spare time if given the chance as long as server costs got paid for.
In fact, from my understanding, recreation.gov is built on top of tons of open source software (they use docker on Kubernetes, react, etc).
Also "coalition of open source volunteers" sounds absolutely scary to me, government or not. Is there anything anywhere that runs this way? At some point, SOMEONE has to be accountable and pay the bills and receive the money.
"Is there anything anywhere that runs this way?"
Co-ops exist at all levels all over the place, and even outperform traditional commercial organizations so, yes.
Currently there is a lot of red tape (which doesn’t even seem to be working).
It is a hard issue though. Perhaps that might be a good starting point for some motivated, civic minded entrepreneurs.
https://www.pcta.org/discover-the-trail/john-muir-trail/jmt-...
https://www.recreation.gov/permits/233260
Seems like a racket to charge money for hunting federal lands, when many of the lands have been purchased or maintained using the conservation/hunting excise tax on firearms and ammunition.
Gotta love Biz Journals, they do good work even if 99.9% of it seems like it doesn't apply to me: https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2018/04/11/nic-m...
That points us to this: https://www.egov.com/what-we-do/outdoor/
Broken link to original press release, maybe on archive.org? https://tylertech.irpass.com/Tyler-Technologies-Completes-Ac...
"Tyler Technologies was founded by Joseph F. McKinney in 1966 as Saturn Industries after buying three government companies from Ling-Temco-Vought." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Technologies
"This was a target procurement for us,” says Booz Allen’s Chief Innovation Officer Susan Penfield. “It represented the shift from Booz Allen’s management consulting heritage to the delivery of modern, large-scale digital platforms." https://www.fastcompany.com/90666188/innovating-in-the-great...
BAH also provides Advana, the Hadoop / Spark platform that was initially developed to support the Pentagon's audit and is now the centerpiece of the Chief Digital and AI Office, so Ms. Penfield's quote above does seem consistent.
And the general trend of trying to make better use of ways to work with the government is a general trend of their modernization efforts, e.g.: * https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/323337... * https://aaf.dau.edu/aaf/contracting-cone/
Would a constitutional against this sort of thing help keep the country governable?
so what there are fees so that government doesn’t need to pay or build any of it - I’d rather pay them than get charged more in taxes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33834006
As phnofive pointed out, there was an earlier discussion --
Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33789501 - Nov 2022 (25 comments)
-- but it never made the front page, so we won't count the current thread as a dupe.
The normal state of news is that a story breaks and there are 300 near identical articles about it in 24 hours. Google News wouldn't have been successful if they hadn't developed a clustering algorithm that handles this.
Ordinary clustering algorithms don't work well for documents period in my experience and I am not sure if that's the right approach to topic identification. But if we're going to get past RSS readers having the same failing interface that has been failing since 1999 and get past the idea that social media is bad because "algorithms = bad" we need some algorithm to tame the many "me too" blog posts that come whenever a blog post breaks onto the front of HN.
What exactly are "we" supposed to do about it?