To Fix the Ills of Tourism, Think Like a Traffic Engineer

Exploding global tourism is becoming a mess, and the way to fix it involves thinking about people like cars.
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As the number of annual tourists climbs toward 2 billion a year, transportation ideas offer a different mindset, rooted in engineering and volume and flows, to places feeling trodden upon by hordes of sightseers.VCG/Getty Images

The travel bug is spreading. Over the last two decades, the global number of tourists has doubled from 550 million itinerant individuals in 1996, to 1.25 billion in 2016. And that upward hike has been steady. The travel industry predicts that by 2030, the number of annual tourists will reach 2 billion.

Two billion people! In line at the Louvre! Taking selfies on the Great Wall! Jostling for towel space in Tulum! Are the world’s top attractions, ready for all this traffic? The answer is loud and clear as a cruise ship’s horn rolling across Montego Bay: Noooooooooo.

The travel industry’s lack of readiness for this crush is both astounding and understandable. Overcrowding has been a problem for decades, but the problems it creates haven’t yet hit tourism’s profits. Along with the crowds come issues like environmental degradation and locals being priced out of their neighborhoods.

For some top travel destinations, however, the consequence gap could finally be closing. Japan recently clamped down on AirBnB. Barcelona has barred new hotels from opening. Venice is so impacted by tourism that Unesco is threatening to add the World Heritage city to its “in danger” list—which would put the city in the same company as Syria’s war-torn antiquities.

Most travel destinations want to continue profiting from tourists, they just don’t want to be trampled beneath them. “People are trying to get to the same place at the same time, and there’s so many of them they are clogging everything up,” says Dean MacCannell, an emeritus professor at UC Davis who spent much of his career looking at tourism. Measures that target subgroups or certain behaviors (like cruise ship passengers, hotel guests, and those so undignified, they eat while walking) are costly to enforce and have bad optics. Worse, they are short sighted efforts that tackle various symptoms without considering the bigger problem.

That’s why the folks working the doors—by which I mostly mean the governments and policy makers in charge of hotspots—ought to take a few lessons from the transportation world. Because tourists are traffic. And they can be managed as such.

Just to be clear: Transportation engineers and literature don’t have any readymade cure-alls. (You may have noticed traffic jams still exist.) What unclogs Bali won’t restore balance in Barcelona. Rather, transportation ideas offer a different mindset, one rooted in engineering and volume and flows, to places feeling trodden upon by hordes of sightseers.

Spread the Wealth (And the Pain)

Congestion happens when there’s too much demand and not enough supply. It’s bad, but also good, since it’s a literal representation of people wanting to go someplace and spend money. Which is why cities don’t tackle congestion by shutting down the highways and telling commuters to stay home.

Proactive cities manage their traffic through supply and demand. They fiddle with the prices or availability of things like roads, rails, buses, parking spots, and housing stock. A city facing a glut of suburban car congestion might increase urban parking fees to discourage people from driving in, but also pave extra lot space around its outlying metro stations to encourage more people to park and ride.

For tourist attractions, supply is the space surrounding the thing everyone wants to take a selfie with. Or the fountain-lined avenue leading to the cafe everyone saw on Instagram. Or the Renaissance neighborhood built around the gothic cathedral. Demand is all the people in visors and sneakers.

Tourist destinations don’t want to lose this traffic—which is evident in the fact that it’s taken most of them so long to do anything about it. Instead, they could manipulate the supply and demand balance to direct folks away from the most impacted areas.

For instance, Rome’s tourist thoroughfares encompass famous relics like the Colosseum, Forum, Trevi Fountain, Pantheon, Castel Sant’Angelo, and the Vatican. During high season, the whole area is a humid mess of bodies. But, this is not all the Eternal City has to offer! Did you know Rome has a pyramid? It is right next to an impressive castle-looking gate that dates to the 3rd Century, and a short walk from the 115-foot-tall hill made of discarded Imperial era olive oil jars. The place is full of clustered sights that might bleed off some of the pressure affecting its most famous attractions, without turning away any of that lucrative touristic appeal or closing anyone’s wallet.

Of course, alluring tourists to these offshoots would take some work from the city to increase and support demand—widening sidewalks, adding shaded areas, deploying more police, curtailing car traffic, offering discounted public transit tickets to these neighborhoods. They could pair these with measures that decrease demand at today’s overburdened sights, like increasing entrance fees. Not all of this is painless, and a lot of it would get pushback.

Pushback officials should listen to, and work into their plans. The whole point here is to balance the interests of everyone in the city, from locals to businesses to yes, visitors. This is just to say that places should try to divert their congestion internally before undertaking policies that make people not want to come at all.

Balancing Supply and Demand

But what about destinations that have surpassed their saturation point, like Venice? The Queen of the Adriatic is a confluence of wonders. It has art, architecture, imperilled beauty, fascinating history, unique infrastructure, and decent seafood. It’s also a huge bargain to visit, which is sort of a problem.

Venice’s airport is often the cheapest point of arrival or departure for Italy. Between hostels, AirBnBs, and the proliferation of hotels, it’s possible to stay in the lagoon for under $100 a night, even during high season. Not to mention that with all the cruise ships coming and going, people can see the sights and be out of town before they get hungry enough to spend a single euro at any of the city’s restaurants, markets, or gelato stands.

But the real way to tell that Venice is underpriced is by examining whether the low cost of tourism is a net gain for the people living there. Looking simply at the number of locals who are moving away, the answer is a pretty firm no. In his book If Venice Dies, Italian author Salvatore Settis outlines how tourism doesn’t seem trickle down enough wealth to provide a substantial quality of life for many Venetians. Not only that, but demand for new hotels, AirBnBs, and vacation homes for wealthy out-of-towners has driven up the cost of housing in the city’s historic core.

Between that and the lack of other industries capable of paying a living wage, Settis says the city’s population (not counting suburbs and neighboring cities on the mainland and nearby islands) has been dropping for decades. In 2009, it dipped below 60,000 for the first time in over 500 years. That’s two-thirds the number of people living in the city in the early 1630s—right after the Black Death swept through.

What does all this mean? Well, it stands to reason that the city is selling itself short, and could stand to raise prices. It could make it more expensive for airplanes to land at Marco Polo International Airport, increase docking fees for cruise ships, or raise taxes on overnight guests. Italy’s tourism official says the nation’s cities must remain “free.” But that’s free as in liber, not gratis.

“There could be a sweet spot of fewer tourists but better profits,” says MacCannell, who advocates for changes like these in the many places that reach out to him for consultations. Unfortunately, most places don’t take his advice. “There’s no will, due to the extent that local politicians are in bed with the tourism industry,” he says.

On the other hand, the spate of anti-tourism legislation suggests change is on the way—perhaps the tourist traffickers will reach a synthesis with those wishing the hordes away. If there is a light at the end of the tunnel, just hope it doesn’t turn out to be more brake lights.

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