ABSTRACT
Cars are both a form of transportation and a mechanism for experiencing an area. For example, visitors to parks and protected areas use cars to get to and from attraction sites and recreation activities. However, driving through a park can also be an important part of the recreation experience, and visitors are often seen driving slowly to observe scenery, taking pictures out of car windows, and generally exploring areas by automobile instead of by foot. Some protected areas, such as the US National Park Service’s (NPS) Blue Ridge Parkway, were explicitly established and designed to provide recreational driving experiences within scenic natural landscapes of the US (Havlick 2002). The Blue Ridge Parkway is the most visited NPS site, and the George Washington Memorial and Natchez Trace Parkways are among the other ten most visited NPS sites (National Park Service 2009).
