Monitoring traffic and estimating visitor use for the Schoodic Peninsula in Acadia National Park, 2015

Jacobi, Charles; Seymour, Abby

From the executive summary: "Since 1990, measuring visitor use of the Schoodic District has been based on a traffic counter located south of the entrance to the new Schoodic Woods Campground and north of the Frazer Creek causeway. Persons-per-vehicle (PPV) multipliers established in the late 1980s are applied to estimate recreation use. Monthly estimates of non-recreation and non-reportable traffic (multiplied by different non-recreation PPVs) are subtracted every month to calculate this recreation use. The traffic counter stopped working in early 2014. Understanding estimates of recreation use at Schoodic is complicated by the many years of non-recreation traffic to and from the navy base and the closure of the base in 2002. It was further entangled between 2004 and 2011 by the non-reportable visits related to the construction, demolition, and development of the Schoodic Education and Research Center (SERC) campus and the creation of what is now the Schoodic Institute and its programs. The first full year of the operation of the Schoodic Woods campground in 2016 will add yet another element of non-recreation and non-reportable use. Because of this history, the reliability of any trend analysis of Schoodic District is suspect, and we did not attempt it. In 2015 we set up a Jamar temporary tube counter south of Frazer Creek picnic area on the one-way road to avoid most of the continued construction traffic associated with Schoodic Woods Campground development, especially the bicycle causeway construction. This traffic counter collected data from late May to late October. We did not validate this traffic counter but we did check it every two weeks to ensure it was still operating correctly. Mean daily traffic in July, August, and September was around 459, 531, and 423 vehicles respectively. Peak hourly traffic rarely exceeded 100 vehicles. The busiest hours were 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. The peak daily traffic of 898 for August was due to the Winter Harbor Lobster Festival when there were nearly four consecutive hours with 100 or more vehicles per hour. Peak daily traffic in September was on Sunday September 6 of the Labor Day weekend. A closer look at the data reveals that weekends in every month are busier than weekdays, suggesting a strong local component to visitation. There was also no increase in traffic for sunrise or sunset as is seen for Cadillac Mountain on Mount Desert Island. As described above, recreation use of the Schoodic District over the past 25 years has been a challenge to understand and explain because of the navy base and the activities and construction associated SERC and Schoodic Woods. However, the 2015 estimates may be as good as any we have had in many years. Nearly 170,000 recreation visits occurred south of the Frazer Creek Picnic Area from June 1 to October 31 and overall there were more than 190,000 recreation visits over these five months. Over the entire year, use was estimated as 228,000. Only further monitoring with consistent and reliable methods will establish the range of typical use levels we can expect as the Schoodic Woods Campground and other facilities enter their first full year of use. We will need a permanent traffic counter north of Schoodic Woods to estimate visitor use year-round as soon as possible."

Monitoring traffic and estimating visitor use for the Schoodic Peninsula in Acadia National Park, 2015

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