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Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

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101–110 of 278 posts

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way would be to charge a modest lottery entrance fee and limit the number of winners to a sensible quota.

Rationing is not a very fair way to distribute goods or services to people. Some people may value it just enough to pay the entry fee, while others might value it a lot more, but now they have the same chances of receiving it. If you prohibit people from on-selling their tickets, then you also causes losses when people change their minds but are already locked in by the lottery.

This kind of argument only works if everybody has the same amount of money (or other tokens) to spend.

In the real world, market prices for this kind of thing simply select for rich people, not for who values the experience the most.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#102
post #55

Welcome to the world of, by some measures, "too many" people having too much disposable wealth. There are obviously worse problems to have. But overtourism is a problem that's only going to get worse. This even affects Mount Everest where people are literally dying just to say they stood at the top of the world. And Everest simply can't support the number of climbers now. You see this in US national parks where the o…

I much perfer to see the oddities a place has to offer, it would be a shame to not be able to visit because others need to stand in a crowd looking at the Mona Lisa.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#103
post #24

Currently living in Barcelona, where 'overtourism' is a much bigger problem than in Norway IMHO, it feels weird. You start passing bills on restricting tourism, then the natural next step is being hard on immigration, then Brexit. The ability to control who goes in and who goes out usually falls on the hand of those that shouldn't have that kind of power. Edit: Removed "At the risk of being downvoted" as some comment…

> You start passing bills on restricting tourism, then the natural next step is being hard on immigration, then Brexit. This is kind of an interesting comment if you overthink it, as I enjoy doing. By my reading, "then the natural next step is being hard on immigration" is a rather boldly axiomatic statement, as if being hard on immigration is _Wrong_, full stop. If others hold the opinion that ~open borders are a Go…

It boils down to the fact that borders are artificially constructed. Yeah, even democracy isn't something that came down from the sky. Again, "who are you to block my path?", a very difficult question.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#104
post #6
post #2

Minor correction, the guy's name is Børge Ousland, not Borge.

It's not minor, the implications of such mistakes are enormous (especially in the days of easy copy-pasting, semi-universal support for utf8 on the web, and plenty of ways to do research) on a cultural level. Poor journalism and disdain for what's foreign, the ASCII way. Vae victis.

It can be easy to overlook. For instance I was curious about this TLD the other day

.xn--6frz82g or .移动

Not sure how apt I would be to remember the English version or know which characters those are to type it in the native dialect.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way would be to charge a modest lottery entrance fee and limit the number of winners to a sensible quota.

Rationing is not a very fair way to distribute goods or services to people. Some people may value it just enough to pay the entry fee, while others might value it a lot more, but now they have the same chances of receiving it. If you prohibit people from on-selling their tickets, then you also causes losses when people change their minds but are already locked in by the lottery.

But if you lock it down by pricing out average travelers, that's not fair either.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? It’s a different experience, maybe even a worse one (though that’s pretty subjective), but a lot more people get to have it.

Let's look at the article: >Surging visitor numbers are threatening Norway’s reigning principle of allemannsretten—the freedom to roam, a concept popular across all of Scandinavia. The thousand-year-old government policy states that individuals, as long as they are polite, can legally walk through any piece of undeveloped property and camp for one night without first obtaining the owner’s permission. This right has w…

Sounds like it would be better to create extremely high fines. Idiotic "influencers" should be bankrupted for adding nothing to society and spreading waste.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#107
post #55

Welcome to the world of, by some measures, "too many" people having too much disposable wealth. There are obviously worse problems to have. But overtourism is a problem that's only going to get worse. This even affects Mount Everest where people are literally dying just to say they stood at the top of the world. And Everest simply can't support the number of climbers now. You see this in US national parks where the o…

All three of those methods are used by the Augusta National golf course to control visitor crowds during the Master's golf tournament each year. It seems to work reasonably well in creating a predictable number of guests at any given point during the tournament. But they also are able to control their borders effectively. I don't know how you'd scale this approach up to country-size levels.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#108
post #89
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solving the problem of over-tourism is different than raising the price of travel overall. When talking about over-tourism, we're only really talking about a few thousand places which attract so many tourists that they cannot function in a healthy place. If you increased the price of tourism in those select places, then yes, you might have the unfortunate outcome that only upper-middle-class people could visit Paris…

That's true, I guess I'm conflating "overtourism" specifically with a wider push discouraging people from travel to decrease carbon emissions. You make a fair point, there is plenty of the world left to experience beyond the big hubs like Paris and Rome.

Look at it this way: why is the desire of today's middle class to travel by air more important than the survival of civilization tomorrow?

Travel imposes heavy costs on the world, in its current carbon based form. It's only affordable because we pass these costs on to the future.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#109
post #108
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, I guess I'm conflating "overtourism" specifically with a wider push discouraging people from travel to decrease carbon emissions. You make a fair point, there is plenty of the world left to experience beyond the big hubs like Paris and Rome.

Look at it this way: why is the desire of today's middle class to travel by air more important than the survival of civilization tomorrow? Travel imposes heavy costs on the world, in its current carbon based form. It's only affordable because we pass these costs on to the future.

It's not just the desire to travel by air, it's the economics. When I first moved to Germany I looked into doing a few trips by train, but the flights were much cheaper.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You start passing bills on restricting tourism, then the natural next step is being hard on immigration, then Brexit. This is kind of an interesting comment if you overthink it, as I enjoy doing. By my reading, "then the natural next step is being hard on immigration" is a rather boldly axiomatic statement, as if being hard on immigration is _Wrong_, full stop. If others hold the opinion that ~open borders are a Go…

It boils down to the fact that borders are artificially constructed. Yeah, even democracy isn't something that came down from the sky. Again, "who are you to block my path?", a very difficult question.

> It boils down to the fact that borders are artificially constructed.

Is that what it "boils down to"? Nothing more and nothing less than "borders are artificially constructed"? It happens to be a technically true statement, but are you saying something along the lines of because borders are artificially constructed then therefore it logically follows that they should be removed? If not, what are you saying, exactly?

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