Letter: Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority

Should we be celebrating the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority’s Destiny Award from the U.S. Travel Association?

Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority (Website Visit Lake Tahoe)

Home page and menu tabs

Plan My Visit
Drive to Tahoe
FAQ
Fly to Lake Tahoe
Getting around Tahoe
Healthy Travel Information
Lake Tahoe Road Trip

Home Page

Why is there no mention of the Destination Sustainability program? Nowhere on the homepage of Visit Lake Tahoe is there any mention of sustainability and the protocols that need to be followed while visiting the lake. I thought this campaign was supposed to be a big deal when it was announced and rolled out as the majority of articles about it leaned that way.

The LTVA gave pushback to Fodder’s recommendation that Tahoe should be skipped as a destination because of “a people problem”. The people problem not only includes managing visitors and where they are clustering, but what they are physically doing.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, are spent on attracting people to visit Tahoe to keep the local economy going and the profits flowing. When the visitors do show up, there is now a logistics and environmental crisis.

Plan My Visit
Drive to Tahoe/Lake Tahoe Road Trip

The continued talks and studies about what to do with traffic in and around the Tahoe Basin all agree that more vehicles are coming in and that people need to take public transit instead of driving in the basin. So why would this site promote driving to Tahoe? Not only is Drive to Tahoe the first item on the list under the Plan My Visit tab, but there is also an item on the list called Lake Tahoe Road Trip within this section. You are literally telling people to bring their cars to the basin, and then wondering how to manage them.

FAQ

This list item also mentions driving to Tahoe and gives driving directions from various locations within California, the farthest being San Diego. Under the Driving from San Diego or L.A. directions, it directs people to use Hwy 395. While that highway can be utilized going north on the eastern side of the Sierras, it directs people to travel through rural roads and neighborhoods in Carson Valley, specifically Gardnerville, to arrive at Kingsbury grade instead of following road signs north of Minden on Hwy 395 directing people to Tahoe.

Within this website, there are instructions not to use the Waze app and travel through certain neighborhoods in Tahoe. What makes them think that people in Carson Valley want tourist traffic through their neighborhoods?

Fly to Lake Tahoe

This list item also encourages people to drive to Tahoe once they arrive by plane. It does mention shuttle services, but before that mention is driving.

Getting around Tahoe

While this list item sounds enticing, with further reading it limits where you can go. LakeLink information is first up and clicking on the picture takes you to the website. This service is only for the South Lake Tahoe area, although it mentions expandability.

Next on this list are Lime scooters. Great for single people who want to go short distances. However, these scooters have been prone to be discarded in areas where they can create a nuisance or have even been found in the lake. They are not convenient for families or people wanting to go further. Seems they are more of a toy.

The promotion of bikes also plays to a certain clientele. To utilize bikes to traverse your way to mid-lake or even just beyond South Lake Tahoe, you would need most of the day and would assume that you don’t have any children, little to no beach gear/picnic items and this is purely for biking only and not a means of car transportation substitution. So obviously if you bike to say Camp Richardson or Nevada Beach from South Lake Tahoe, you would most likely be buying food at the destination and not merely going there for a day at the beach with a packed lunch. That’s great for more money flowing into the Tahoe economy coffers, but not practical for the majority of people who visit.

The Plan Ahead If You Must Park item suggests that you could park at Anderson’s Bike Rental or the Y and bike to certain destinations including Emerald Bay. Really? Biking to Emerald Bay for the average visitor?

Who is their “target audience of locals, visitors, and sustainability audience”? I’ve seen numerous people at Tahoe that disregard sustainability. They will blatantly throw their trash wherever they please. Shorelines are being eroded due to excessive waves from boats not obeying no-wake zones. People renting boats who have no clue how to operate them or understand the rules of boating. Traffic, especially in the area of Camp Richardson during summer, is on par with any L.A. freeway.

People can be reminded every day all day long about “preserve the timeless wonder of Tahoe” but in the end, a lot of them just don’t care. It’s another trip to an amusement park for them, and someone else will pick up their discarded trash like the workers at Disneyland do.

“Awe and Then Some” captures what the LTVA would like to believe. The LTVA though is in serious need of a reality check.

- A.Stephens