Assessing and Modeling Visitors’ Evaluations of Park Road Conditions in Yosemite National Park

Introduction Park visitors' travel choices and behavior are longstanding concerns for the National Park Service. Travel behaviors can affect natural and cultural resources and the quality of the visitor experience. Driving park roadways has been central to the Ameri can national park experience since the earliest days of park preservation. As historian David Louter (2006) argued in his book Windshield Wilderness, ''We cannot understand parks without recognizing that cars have been central to shaping how people experience and interpret the meaning of national parks, especially how they perceive them as wild places'' (p. 164). Youngs et al. (2008) concurred, adding, " We cannot un derstand national parks without understanding transportation systems more broadly. " Understanding transportation in parks is thus critical to both the recreational use and preservation mandates of the National Park Service. Nowhere are these issues more prominent than in Yosemite National Park, which has struggled with an appropriate balance between automobile access and park preservation since the turn of the 20th century (Havlick 2002). Roads were first built into Yosemite Valley in the 1870s and by 1913 the first cars entered the valley. During the 1930s, park roads were improved, widened, and paved (Runte 1990). Meanwhile the popularity of auto tourism in America expanded (Colten and Dilsaver 2005), sparked by the ''See America First'' campaign (Shaffer 2001) and the increase in personal automobile ownership. Private automobiles have since become entrenched in park management and visitor culture, leading to what