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Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

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Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#181

Post by dougmwne »

old-gregg wrote: post #170
quacked wrote: post #147

Everywhere there's people complaining about things like this and yet no one says "overpopulation". If there were fewer people on the planet...

It's a taboo word for many reasons that are easy to explain, but mainly because there's nothing that can be done about it. You can try and "build more housing", you can "make it more expensive", you can "implement a lottery system" but you can't get rid of people, so it's not a constructive discussion. The book "Collapse" by Jared Diamond covers this pretty well.

There's absolutely things that can be done that don't involve authoritarian dystopia. Access to contraception and family planning resources. Education. Better childhood healthcare. Improved rights and economic independence for women. Decreased tax incentives for having more children. Improved economic systems that don't rely on endless population growth.

Population growth in most of the developed world is already below replacement once you exclude immigration. So we've already arrived at a successful formula that solves overpopulation without limiting personal freedom.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#182

Post by kjaftaedi »

bjornsing wrote: post #34
ohduran wrote: 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…

Yea it’s a funny word “overtourism”. I guess it’s what you call it when other people go on vacation (whereas when I go on vacation it’s just “tourism”). :P

Living Iceland, the increased amount of tourists means that everything can no longer be written in the local language so that the tourists can understand, and that when you go to a restaurant, you often can't even order food using icelandic as the staff won't understand you, walking down the street, everyone is speaking English to each other, things that used to be free and offered to the public, now have to come at a charge due to the amount of people trying to take advantage of a place or a service, and the fact that we have several times the amount of tourists as we do locals, it's eroding the culture.. quickly.

At least for me, I feel a difference between tourism, and over-tourism.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#183

Post by scarejunba »

m4rtink wrote: post #146
scarejunba wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just auction? That way you don’t have the misallocation of quotas without auctions, the uncertainty of lotteries, or the deadweight loss of incorrect price choosing. Pick a number the trail can handle, auction tickets.

Sure - if you don't mind cutting off all less wealthy travelers, then go ahead.

Well, there are options here. You could assume that the time value for the wealthy travelers is high and the time value for the poor travelers is low. Your objective is to maximize the (revenue - cost_to_maintain) while retaining some max_visitors. You could then offer the Faroe Islands option: you get to trade off some degree of your time and some degree of your wealth to visit. So you could either pay $1000 to go to Preikestolen or you could help maintain the trail for some x days etc.

Ultimately, let's be honest: we want the most number of people to be able to experience these things (I fortunately went to most of these places before the recent boom and I think they're wonderful) while ensuring that the cost to the environment isn't catastrophic. That means some people can't go. We can pick some mechanism but it will necessarily exclude some people. The money is the best selection mechanism because we can use it at pretty high granularity on preserving the thing that is bearing the cost, but any substitute that serves the purpose does just as well.

The key magic is that with money we can undo some damage. That's what makes it a useful thing to auction on.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#184

Post by dredmorbius »

mogadsheu wrote: post #118

I think the answer is clear, if not a bit brutal: raise prices for tourists. Tourism is a luxury, not a right, and if there is a perceived negative externality to Norway from overtourism, it should be mitigated in the market. There will be fewer people who are willing to go to Trolltunga if they are not a Norwegian resident and the price of entry is $200. Sidenote: I lived in Norway for a few years, gorgeous place bu…

Why should travel be the exclusive domain of the wealthy?

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#185

Post by tptacek »

frereubu wrote: post #180
dang wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how to refine the "commenting about voting" guideline? Normal chattiness in comments is totally fine. What's tedious is "I, the noble freethinker against the hideous masses" posturing. It's also common, because of the biases in how people perceive the community; basically, anything you dislike shapes that perception 10x more than anything you like, so most people's image of the community becomes an inverse i…

"Preemptive defensiveness" hits the nail on the head for me. It's most problematic when it's the first thing in a comment, and makes it difficult for me to take the rest of the comment seriously, no matter carefully worded it is. I find it easier to write off as chatty if it's later in the comment and / or more offhanded like "... although I know that's not exactly flavour of the month on HN." The fact that it comes…

The problem here is that ordinary people sometimes start deep conversations with phrases like "this isn't going to win me any friends, but..." or even "candidly:".

It's natural to guideline out people (1) working the metaphorical refs with asides about voting and (2) posturing and, at the same time, implicitly disrespecting even the notion that some people might disagree with them. The former invites horrible meta conversations, the latter is uncivil and toxic.

But you don't want to go so far that people have to alter totally normal speech patterns in order to avoid some conversation tripwire that the guidelines set. If you do that, you get more pointless meta threads.

What I think you want is a guideline that says "no matter what, don't talk about how your comments are being voted, and if you must mention the feeling you have that what you're about to say is probably unpopular, do it in a nice way, and quickly". I don't know how to say that with any kind of concision.

(A lot of things would work as guidelines if they could capture the nuance of "this way of writing is fine if you assume the burden of being extra gracious about it, but not fine to do casually and thoughtlessly". But it's super hard to distill that sentiment into a guideline!)

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#186

Post by Dumblydorr »

el_cujo wrote: post #21

I'm glad they're approaching it in a way beyond just "make everything more expensive". It's interesting how when it comes to climate change, a lot of the same people who are otherwise committed to egalitarian ideals immediately jump to "just charge more" as a solution for everything. I'm not saying those kind of policies can't be a piece of the solution, but I really don't see it being effective to tell all but the r…

People will still go even if it's expensive, even if it causes emissions. People are irrational, economists have struggled with this fact of psychology for years.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#187

Post by schoen »

munificent wrote: post #178
cletus wrote: 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…

> "too many" people having too much disposable wealth. I don't think this is the problem at all. The world is huge. There are millions of tourist destinations and plenty of room for people in all of them. The problem is with distribution. Social media creates power law distributions of attention. There are a few pieces of writing I wish every human on Earth had read and this is one of them: http://shirky.com/writings…

This is a great point! I've noticed a similar thing with Muir Woods in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are other amazing ancient redwood forests in several other places nearby (e.g. Samuel P. Taylor State Park, Redwood Regional Park, Joaquin Miller Park, the north side of Mount Tamalpais facing Fairfax, and several places along both sides of Skyline Drive along the peninsula -- probably among others that I don't know).

OK, the redwood trees in them might be only 80% as old and tall, the United Nations might not have been founded inside them, and some of them might have only 6 km of trails through the forest rather than 10 km. But many of these places are often nearly deserted, have no entrance fee, are a quicker and less twisty drive from San Francisco, and are incredibly majestic, peaceful, and spectacular.

Meanwhile, Muir Woods had to introduce a rationing and permit system to visit by private car or public bus (https://gomuirwoods.com/), and along the main trail on the valley floor you are basically never out of sight of other visitors during a weekend or holiday.

I've reserved a picnic area inside an ancient redwood grove for an upcoming birthday picnic.

https://www.yelp.com/biz/lake-lagunitas-fairfax

OK, it's definitely no Muir Woods, but it's just 6 km north of Muir Woods and you can reserve the area for a small fee on a weekend during the summertime.

I think the power-law effects you describe have been true of tourism forever. Muir Woods has attracted dramatically more tourists than the MMWD or EBMUD redwood groves for decades. But I also think you're right that the Internet is accelerating them, because you can hear about where to go via discovery mechanisms that so drastically and rapidly reward pre-existing popularity.

(If you live in or visit the Bay Area, check out https://www.marinwater.org/175/Directions-Maps-to-Watershed-... and https://www.ebmud.com/recreation/east-bay/east-bay-trails/ for information about hiking in -- often -- redwood forests owned by municipal water districts in reservoir watersheds, or https://www.marinwater.org/DocumentCenter/View/156/Map_Marin... for a map of all public lands in Marin County.)

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#188

Post by reificator »

munificent wrote: post #178
cletus wrote: 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…

> "too many" people having too much disposable wealth. I don't think this is the problem at all. The world is huge. There are millions of tourist destinations and plenty of room for people in all of them. The problem is with distribution. Social media creates power law distributions of attention. There are a few pieces of writing I wish every human on Earth had read and this is one of them: http://shirky.com/writings…

> The problem is with distribution. Social media creates power law distributions of attention. There are a few pieces of writing I wish every human on Earth had read and this is one of them:

> http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

I really hope this post was self aware.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#189

Post by tomcooks »

brummm wrote: post #32
tomcooks wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's often the same with German names/words. Ü/U, etc are absolutely not the same and not equivalent. Leaving out the two dots on top of the U changes the whole word/meaning. Ü would be equivalently written as ue.

I've always wondered if German speakers are generally ok with "ue"?

I've seen it used on URL's

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#190

Post by purple_ducks »

dredmorbius wrote: post #184
mogadsheu wrote: post #118

I think the answer is clear, if not a bit brutal: raise prices for tourists. Tourism is a luxury, not a right, and if there is a perceived negative externality to Norway from overtourism, it should be mitigated in the market. There will be fewer people who are willing to go to Trolltunga if they are not a Norwegian resident and the price of entry is $200. Sidenote: I lived in Norway for a few years, gorgeous place bu…

Why should travel be the exclusive domain of the wealthy?

Low cost travel & tourism are _not_ rights. They're privileges. Seems fair to include negative externalities in the cost. If that excludes some people, so be it. They can travel closer to home.
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