Lake Tahoe organizations create a plan to better handle peak season crowds

Famous California destinations like Lake Tahoe saw a huge surge in visitors at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. With that came a host of issues — crowding, littering, traffic and more. 

Tony Karwowski, president and CEO of the North Tahoe Community Alliance, said these problems aren’t new to Tahoe. But as pandemic crowds died down, he said organizations like his own – which handles destination marketing for the area and also serves as the region’s chamber of commerce – felt a renewed sense of urgency in addressing the issues. 

“COVID really put an emphasis on those [issues] and made us aware of how important it is for us, moving forward, to try to utilize the resources that tourism generates to put back into solving some of those issues,” he said. 

His and other Tahoe-based organizations recently launched the Lake Tahoe Destination Stewardship plan as a means of mapping out their response. In the plan, they identified a few main sources of concern like upticks in traffic and littering, as well as concerns like rising housing costs due to more people interested in moving and working near Lake Tahoe.  

These issues make it hard for both visitors and residents of the area, Karwowski said. Some of the solutions outlined in the plan include seasonal parking limitations, stronger litter enforcement, support for shuttle services and building out additional worker housing. 

“How we take care of our region ultimately [is] an everyday thing, whether it’s visitors or residents and locals,” Karwowski said. “They're the ones who came to us during the pandemic and said this has got to change.”

But Tahoe isn’t the first to come up with a plan like this one. Ryne Leuzinger, board president for the Community Association of Big Sur, said Big Sur has seen similar issues to Tahoe in recent years and launched a plan to address them in 2021. 

“Amidst these disruptions with highway outages, with floods, with fires, there's still an annual trend of more and more visitors per year,” he said. “That's a reflection of Big Sur being much more out there in the media, particularly social media.”

Leuzinger said there are limits to what places like Big Sur can do when responding to seasonal crowding. Since the community is located along a highway and serves as a thruway for people passing through the region, he said Big Sur can’t impose visitor caps like some state parks are able to. They have to approach the issue a little differently. 

“There is a tendency for people to really want to visit a couple of particular places in Big Sur, like Bixby Bridge,” he said. “Because it's a place that doesn't have any infrastructure in terms of bathrooms, in terms of many actual parking spots, how do we think about that space as something that can still be accessed but in a safe way, in a way that doesn't impede the flow of highway traffic?”

Many solutions outlined in Big Sur’s plan echo Tahoe’s, like offering more bins to dispose of waste during peak seasons and implementing a parking reservation system.