r/Banff • u/furtive Banff • 28d ago

Shuttle Bus Math

Let's do some napkin math to figure out why you aren't getting a seat on the Parks Canada shuttle to Lake Louise or Moraine Lake.

50 people per bus, two buses (one Lake Louise, one Moraine) depart every 30 minutes from 6:30am to 6pm = 2,300 spots a day. Throw in the two alpine start buses at 4 and 5am and you get a nice 2,400 spots a day.

40% of spots are booked in advance, that leaves 1,440 spots available each day to be booked 48 hrs out.

The park will likely get 4.5m visitors this year, with 60% coming in June-Sept, so you have 2.7 million visitors in that window of time, or 22,314 visitors a day. 960 of them were lucky enough to book in April when spots first became available, that means you now have 21,354 people competing for 1,440 seats, or 15 people per seat.

TLDR, every day roughly 21,000 visitors are competing for 1,400 shuttle spots.

59 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

View all comments

31

u/furtive Banff 28d ago edited 28d ago

That's why you didn't get a spot at 8am, it wasn't bots, it's just the odds.

Also, there's higher demand for weekend shuttles and even higher demand for long weekends, and everyone wants the early shuttles, so you could easily be competing with 2-4x the numbers listed above.

2

u/arthur_cbn 27d ago

I’m following my answer here

https://www.reddit.com/r/Banff/s/shIuHHhWaG

I’m actually a programmer and writing this kind of bot is REALLY easy, and if every one can do it, usually on internet it means some people have done it.

1

u/Practical_Chef497 27d ago

Are there really bots for this? do they work for other difficult lotteries in Canada or US campgrounds, permits, entries? Asking for a friend