12 December 2019 — 1513 mst
The megabucks spent rebuilding Sperry Chalet
might have been better spent on Sun Road shuttles
Next summer you can stay in Sperry Chalet (reservations required), reconstructed after burning down in the 2017 Sprague Fire — but you may not be able to take the free shuttle to the trailhead. Yesterday the Flathead County Commission pulled out of the 2007 agreement with Glacier National Park to run the shuttles that carried 255,000 in 2019.
The details are in excellent reports by Tristan Scott at the Flathead Beacon, and Kianna Gardner at the Daily InterLake, and the Beacon has a link to the commission’s letter to GNP.
There’s a lot going on here, including the possibility that giant park concessionaire companies want to seize the shuttle action. In a moment, I'll offer some thoughts on the shuttle's future. But first, a note on costs.
Sperry is an order of magnitude costlier than the shuttle
What stands out like a road apple on a dessert doily is the startling disparity in the cost per visitor served between the chalet and the shuttle service. My back-of-the-envelope analysis suggests that Sperry is a hole in the forest that burns dollars faster than a Russian oligarch's megayacht burns rubles.
Cost of shuttles. According to the commission’s letter, running the shuttle service in 2020 would cost $1.45 million. Assuming it would actually cost $1.5 million and serve 250,000 visitors, that’s six dollars per shuttle rider.
Capital cost of Sperry Chalet. This is a bit tricky to determine. In June, 2018, then Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke said reconstruction would cost $12 million, and promised to provide the money. The NPS awarded $4 million to stabilize the structure, and another $4.7 million for the reconstruction accomplished in 2019. That’s $8.7 million, which I’m rounding to $9 million as I’m sure there are other costs associated with the project. For simplicity’s sake, I’m assuming the capital cost is $9 million amortized over 20 years at three percent annual interest. That’s approximately $600,000 per year.
The chalet’s historic capacity was 54 guests. I’m going to assume full capacity every day the chalet is open. And I’m going to assume that global warming results in a 122-day, June through September, season. That’s approximately 6,600 guest days. $600k/6,600 ≈ $90 per guest day, or 15 times as much per visitor as the cost of the shuttle.
A park shuttle for the future
Suppose GNP decided to spend $15 per shuttle rider on a modern shuttle fleet. That would cost $3.8 million for 250k riders, $7.6 million for 500k riders, and approximately $15 million for a million riders. Suppose further, that GNP charged five dollars for a one-day shuttle pass. I strongly suspect that amount of money could sustain a modern, all electric, fleet of non-polluting mini-buses, which of course would stop at the Sperry trailhead to disembark visitors bound for the chalet.
Running such a system might prove immensely lucrative to big-league park concessionaires — especially if GNP decides to ban motor vehicles carrying fewer than three or two visitors, thus condemning solo visitors to public transportation. That dystopian outcome seems considerably less far-fetched a possibility than it was a decade ago, let alone fifty years ago when I never had trouble finding a parking place at Logan Pass or a trailhead.
Whether any shuttle will run in 2020 remains in doubt. I suspect the commission’s bailout may be a bargaining tactic designed to squeeze more money out of GNP. That probably would require a congressional appropriation, and might be possible. Therefore, there’s a possibility that the shuttle, provided better funding, will run in 2020 in some form similar to 2019. But I suspect major changes will occur after 2020, and that GNP and the concessionaire cartel will succeed in running Flathead County off the Sun Road.