Homes and driveways line the last stretch of road outside the West Entrance, the busiest gate in the park. This stop explains why the fee station moved about half a mile inside the boundary, and what staff used to do when the wait ran past 15 minutes.
Count the driveways along here. The park's busiest entrance sits at the end of a neighborhood, and in two thousand twenty-three, more than five hundred fifteen thousand vehicles passed through it. The old kiosk stood about two hundred fifty feet inside the boundary, so the line ran out past it, blocking these homes and slowing emergency vehicles, with waits up to forty-five minutes. That's why the fee station moved in. When the wait passed fifteen minutes, staff would wave cars through without charging, sometimes for an hour and a half, at about sixteen hundred dollars an hour.
Photo: Steven Lek · CC BY-SA 4.0