Every couple of hours, we hear them coming. When the “pedal pub” slowly crawls through downtown Sitka, the multi-passenger bicycle turns heads. As the lime green vehicle passes city hall, it makes a left turn onto an ever so slightly elevated street. The hill is barely perceptible to the human eye, but the 15 cyclists holler louder, pushing themselves over the hump.
An hour later, they come by again. Around and around the pedal pub goes, stopping at bars on Lincoln Street to break up the passengers’ cardio workouts with a drink.
“I need more beer for this” one passenger yells, catching his breath. “A little help here?!” laughs another.
It’s a sound unique to the summer months in Sitka, when hundreds of thousands of cruise ship visitors disembark from their floating cities to revel in the beauty of Southeast Alaska. But another sound Sitkans have gotten familiar with is this:
A fleet of tour buses runs almost nonstop when a ship is in port. Unlike other Southeast communities, Sitka’s cruise dock isn’t downtown, it’s six miles north. That means bussing tourists is a big part of the equation, and not everyone is happy about it.
Peter Hagan is a local painter and contractor. This summer, he spent a month working on a house next to the state highway, buses passing by every few minutes.
“I’d go home with a headache, nausea, short of breath, my eyes were burning, and irritated,” Hagan said.
“It was like I was living in LA. I smelled it. It was diesel exhaust, there wasn’t any question,” he continued. “You could see it coming out of the pipes on the on the coaches.
Hagan says he’s pro-tourism, but the experience cemented in Hagan’s mind the idea that cruise traffic in Sitka was getting out of control, and both people and the environment were feeling the effects in a very big way.
“They [the cruise tourists] should see Southeast Alaska for what it is and that’s a world class preserve,” Hagan said. “We don’t need floating cities docking, and slides and racecars and SpaceX rocket launchers and thrill rides. They’re missing the very essence of what we are.”
The summer of 2023 blew the previous year’s record-breaking cruise season out of the water. 585,000 passengers visited Sitka from late April to early October . With that came big business, and an economic recovery after two quiet pandemic years. For many Sitkans it was an opportunity: New tour businesses and food carts flourished, and Sitka’s main street was closed to traffic and turned into a pedestrian mall for 76 days of the summer But it also brought congestion and concerns about bus traffic, ebikes, and pedestrian safety. And with those concerns came some community pushback.
Larry Edwards and a group of around 40 other Sitkans tried twice this fall to get a ballot proposition on a 240,000 annual cruise visitor cap out to voters in a special election.
“It’s just absolute chaos” Edwards said in a press conference the day he filed the paperwork for the first ballot proposition.
“I feel that the cruise industry thinks it’s the planning director of the city and that we have to march to its orders,” he said. “I think we need to take control back.”
Both petitions failed to pass a review by the city’s attorney, who cited a variety of potential legal pitfalls in attempting to restrict the use of a private dock.
A similar question in Bar Harbor, Maine will be the litmus test for whether a municipality can legally limit cruise traffic at a private dock. A federal judge is expected to issue a ruling on that case soon.
The day Edwards’ second petition was denied, Sitka Dock Company owner Chris McGraw announced he’s imposing his own limits on the size and number of ships allowed to dock at the terminal each day.
“It kind of all got hit at once,” McGraw said. “And I think we’re now, you know, working to try and get caught up.”
McGraw thinks if COVID hadn’t happened, the community’s adjustment would have been a little easier as the cruise numbers scaled up slower. He’s hoping that curbing the number of ships and passengers, staggering arrivals, and building new infrastructure, like a theater at the dock, will help better disperse the passengers, cut down on bus traffic, and relieve some pressure.
“I guess my message would be…let’s go get our numbers and see if we can slow everything down a little bit,” McGraw said. “But then also work to catch up our infrastructure, catch up our tours, so that we can meet the demand that that we’d like to see and that is ultimately healthy, in my opinion, for the community.”
He hasn’t landed on a number yet, but McGraw says the limits he sets would be subject to adjustment. Ultimately, he says Sitka needs the high numbers of cruise visitors to keep local tour businesses viable.
October was quiet in Sitka. Some restaurants and shops closed down for the month to catch their breath. But in November, the city’s Tourism Task Force was back at work hosting its first town hall, inviting locals to take stock of the summer – especially the level of cruise tourism.
Nearly 300 Sitkans filled the room wall-to-wall, scribbling their thoughts on sticky notes. A word cloud was projected on a wall, updating in real time as participants submitted words like crowded, booming, profit, noisy. Task force member Barbara Bingham stood beside a row of jars with labels asking people to rate the “most important aspect of managing the cruise industry.” Next to those jars were tiny paper cups of pinto beans.
“They can put all their beans in one jar, if they really felt strongly about something,” Bingham explained. “And then we’re going to count the beans!”
The town hall was just the first of several planned between now and the task force’s April deadline to make recommendations to the Assembly. For some, dropping beans didn’t capture their feelings – on either side of the issue.
The public process is slow. Even if the Sitka Assembly could decide on a course of action by next spring, it would not change the fact that nextthe summer of ‘24 is going to look a lot like the summer of ‘23. Even if Sitka’s private cruise dock implements changes, they wouldn’t be in effect until 2025.
In the meantime, Sitkans are collectively riding their own version of the pedal pub, heading up – and one day – over the hump.
This story was one part of CoastAlaska’s four-part series on tourism in Southeast. Listen to the other stories here:
Arctic Bar owner Paula Weisel on enduring and changing in Ketchikan
