Many of Acadia National Park’s upcoming construction projects will continue to address congestion at the park after it hit more than 4 million visits last year.
Acadia Superintendent Kevin Schneider, among other park officials, on Monday presented Acadia’s citizen advisory commission with a handful of construction plans for the next several years that are aimed at relieving the park’s mounting traffic problems.
The park recorded its busiest year to date in 2025. The upcoming projects will seek to control the traffic and safety concerns that have followed the visitation surge.
The plans were discussed at a meeting for Acadia’s citizen advisory commission, which is directed by Congress to meet three times a year and tasked with advising the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior on park management.
Despite being charged to meet three times a year, Monday’s meeting of the commission was the first since last September as park management copes with changing federal policies and chronic staff shortages.
The commission’s February and June meetings were cancelled, without advance explanation. The commission’s early summer meeting was not held because the department failed to issue a public notice seven days ahead of the meeting, a DOI press officer previously said.
Among the projects is a traffic and parking monitoring program that will give visitors real-time updates on the number of parking spots available at Acadia’s busiest destinations, including Sand Beach and Jordan Pond House.
The project is funded through a $1.5 million grant — issued by the National Park Foundation over the summer to the Schoodic Institute, the park’s scientific research hub — and will be led by the institute, the park and Friends of Acadia, a nonprofit conservation group.
This fall, officials will also create a bus express lane for the Island Explorer, Acadia’s fare-free shuttle system, roughly 1,000 feet north of the Sand Beach entrance station — a notorious choke point that can delay service by over an hour — to the Beehive Trail. The new lane on Park Loop Road, which is limited to southbound vehicles in that section of road, will allow buses to pass through the entrance station faster.
Officials anticipate the shuttle system’s ridership will exceed 500,000 passengers for the 2026 season, amounting to the highest annual total since 2019, according to John Kelly, the park’s management assistant. The Island Explorer has seen two big changes this season: it began operating in May for the first time in its history and extended its service to Trenton, where the park’s new Acadia Gateway Center is located. The bus system has seen about 10 percent more riders than it did last August, Kelly said.
Since it was created in 1999, the bus system has carried a total of more than 10 million people throughout the park.
The new lane on Park Loop Road also will be used by park maintenance workers and local first responders to reach Sand Beach. Kelly pointed to an August incident in which the park’s Search and Rescue teams were delayed in responding to an emergency at Monument Cove because Ocean Drive was blocked with traffic.
The park is also moving forward with plans for a roadside parking lot off Route 233 to service the Eagle Lake carriage roads. As of now, on a busy summer day, as many as 120 cars will be parked in the current lot and along the shoulder of the highway, known locally as Eagle Lake Road. The project, part of the park’s 2019 transportation plan, would provide visitors with a safe location to park just up the road from the carriage road entrance, park superintendent Kevin Schneider said.
“Right now you see visitors with kids unloading their bicycles off the car with traffic going by 50 miles an hour,” Schneider said. “[It’s a] very high risk situation. We’ve been concerned for years.”
The parking lot’s funding will come from Friends of Acadia but has not yet been distributed, Schneider said, adding that officials hope to begin work in the winter.
Officials are also in the preliminary stages of a project, funded through a U.S. Department of Transportation grant, that will double parking capacity at the Hulls Cove Visitors Center and will add a transit hub dedicated to the Island Explorer. The project’s predesign phase will begin this week.
On a different note, park officials said the wastewater systems in the Cadillac Mountain summit and Sand Beach bathrooms failed this spring and are no longer in use. Officials are now designing new septic systems, which would replace the current infrastructure that dates back to the 80s and 90s, for each location and are hoping to begin construction by next fall.
The park has made a couple of attempts to improve the septic capacity at Cadillac, “but these systems were designed at a time when we had 2 million visits versus the 4 million visits we’re counting today,” said Keith Johnson, the park’s chief facilities manager.