WASHINGTON Wildly popular U.S. national parks have become a magnet for visitors who beat a path to nature only to find as many honking cars as honking geese, AFP reported on Saturday.

Fully 289 million visitors -- including 40 million from abroad -- trekked to the 384 sites managed by the U.S. National Park Service in 2000, heeding the call of the wild and ending up cooling their heels behind the wheel.

"There are just too many cars; not too many people visiting the parks," said Kevin Collins of the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group. "The only way to rectify that is with new and creative transportation options."

Shuttles, buses and light rail are among the options floated by environmental activists and park rangers alike to reduce the flow of traffic into the nation's 57 national parks, first among park service destinations for tourists.

The U.S. national park system was founded by an act of Congress on March 1, 1872, with the creation of Yellowstone National Park, a 890,308-hectare (2.2 million-acre) park that straddles Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.

The Park Service, included in the U.S. Department of the Interior, oversees a $1.4-billion budget, supplemented by user fees in areas ranging from Hawaii's Volcanoes National Park to the Statue of Liberty National Monument in New York.

Utah's Zion National Park is considered a prototype for successfully getting people out of their cars. A $10-million appropriation from Congress enabled the park to purchase a fleet of propane-powered buses to transport people to Zion Canyon beginning last May, a program considered a "huge success" by Park Service acting Director Denys Galvin.

"Prior to the shuttle system, on a busy summer day there were 5,000 cars in Zion Canyon, for around 400 parking spaces. People would be arriving before dawn just to get a parking space," said Ron Terry, a spokesman for the 593 square-kilometer (229 square-mile) Cliff and Canyon Park that sees nearly 2.5 million visitors per year.

Meanwhile, at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, flocks of Fords and herds of Hondas are eclipsing tourists' abilities to view the spectacular crevasse, with lines of cars often stretching for miles past the canyon's north and south rims.

The canyon's south rim has been served by a shuttle bus system since 1995, with a moderate impact on the congestion caused by some nearly five million visitors annually. A light rail system has also been in development for nearly five years, though Collins said there is little congressional will to boost the budget to move beyond the planning stage.

Residents in the canyon's surrounding communities worry the proposed light rail could reduce the revenue-generating traffic for the towns on the park's perimeter and replace valuable commercial space with giant parking lots, Galvin said.

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