Electric Buses, Driverless Shuttles and Smarter Maps: How National Parks Are Changing the Ride

A park visit that doesn't start in a traffic jam — that is the goal of a set of transportation projects the National Park Service is running with the U.S. Department of Transportation: testing new technology, building better traveler information, bringing shared rides into parks, electrifying transit fleets and siting electric-vehicle charging where it is needed.

Electric and self-driving buses

Since 2021, the NPS has replaced more than 80 fossil-fuel buses with battery-electric ones, at parks including Grand Canyon and Zion, and has secured funding for 40 more at four other parks — cleaner air, and quieter views.

The Park Service has also tested a self-driving transit bus, in a pilot at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. What it learned will shape three more pilots planned for the coming years.

The ADASTEC/Vicinity Motors autonomous bus charging at the Dune Climb, Sleeping Bear Dunes. Emily Maciejak, Volpe Center.

Park information on your phone

The NPS is getting current information into the mapping platforms visitors already use, such as Google and Apple Maps. Projects under way cover:

• bus and ferry schedules and routes at the busiest parks;
• road closures and incidents — weather, construction, special events;
• vehicle restrictions on roads that not every vehicle can safely drive;
• forecasts of travel conditions by place, season and time of day;
• trip-planning information that points visitors to the park's recommended way to travel.

Ride-hailing, with invisible fences

The Park Service is also working with ride-hailing apps, using geofencing — a virtual boundary on the map — so that pickups and drop-offs happen in the right places, improving safety, easing congestion and helping visitors find their way.

Behind the wheel: STEM

Engineers, scientists and programmers design the buses, build the apps and plan the routes. The NPS works with the U.S. DOT's Volpe Center and the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory to study charging needs for public vehicles, transit buses and the NPS's own fleet, and to plan where charging stations should go along routes — work the Park Service points to as a career path for students who like technology.

Sources

Based on "National Park Transportation: A Green Ride Powered by STEM!," National Park Service, from the series Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM); a work of the United States government in the public domain.