Sean Duffy wants you to see America. His administration is making it harder to afford.

A few days ago, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy dropped a trailer for his upcoming reality series called The Great American Road Trip. He, his wife, and their nine kids drive around the country in a (prominently featured) Toyota. Kid Rock shows up (greaaaat). The logo, and some of the footage, looks AI-generated. The whole thing is positioned as a pro-travel civics lesson timed to coincide with America's 250th birthday.

"To love America is to see America," Duffy says.

I have many fond memories of summer road trips up Highway 395, backpacking and hiking all over the Eastern Sierra. Stops at McDonalds (a road trip treat for us), the Schatts Bakery in Bishop, looking through those little ‘telescope’ pipes in Lone Pine that point at Whitney and Langley. There’s a simplicity and a romanticism to it. You need a car, a tank of gas, and somewhere to point towards.

Beyond concerns about conflicts of interest (the show is sponsored by companies Duffy is supposed to regulate), I think the most grating aspect of Duffy's industry-funded vacation is the blind eye it turns to the current state of the world. The road trip experience Duffy is pitching, the long-haul, cross-country version, is exactly what’s getting harder to do this summer. And the administration he's a part of is the reason why.

The national average for a gallon of regular gas has risen to over $4.50, and is significantly higher in many places. That's up roughly 50% from $2.98 on February 26, the day before the U.S. and Israel launched a war against Iran and the Strait of Hormuz got blockaded. It's the highest gas has been since the immediate aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Add inflation, tariffs on imported goods, and higher food-and-lodging costs, and a road trip in 2026 is noticeably more expensive than it was a year ago.

Those increases have trackable effects. A poll from late April found that 44% of adults have cut back on driving and 34% have adjusted travel or vacation plans because of gas prices. Consumer research firm Technomic estimates that every $0.50 increase in gas prices reduces U.S. consumer spending by roughly $68 billion.

AAA is still projecting 45 million Americans will travel at least 50 miles from home over the holiday weekend. On paper, that's a record. But it's also only a 0.4% increase over last year, which is the smallest year-over-year growth in over a decade (outside of 2020). People are still going to travel, especially around holiday weekends. And road trips are still the more flexible and cheaper option than flying, which has also been affected by fuel prices. But, I would not be surprised to see a shift toward shorter, more regional drives this summer, which could affect outdoor recreation spending.

When gas prices rise, outdoor recreation tourism gets hit hard because so much of it depends on people being willing to drive. Trips & Travel account for $252B of the $696B outdoor recreation economy. In 2008, FHWA recorded the largest year-over-year decline in vehicle miles traveled since record-keeping began. Great Smoky Mountains NP, the most-visited park in the country, dropped 5% in visitation. The NPS at the time attributed the declines in visitation directly to fuel prices. In 2022, visitation held up better, but mostly because of post-COVID demand. The pattern underneath was the same: closer destinations, less spending per visit.

There’s been a lot of recent discussion about increased park fees, but the clearest finding, across multiple studies of NPS attendance over the last few decades, is that the cost of getting to a park matters more than the cost of getting in. A UMass Amherst study that modeled NPS attendance from 1993 to 2010 found that rising fuel prices relative to income were the strongest predictor of visitation declines, more than entrance fees or other factors. Visitation from people living relatively close to a park tends to hold stable during fuel spikes and recessions, while long-haul visitors have a steeper decline and recover more gradually.

Which gateway towns get hit is pretty predictable. The ones close to major metros hold up better, and the ones at the end of long drives lose visitation faster. Even where visitation holds, the spending mix is likely to change. People still come, but they stay shorter, eat cheaper, and skip more expensive local tours and experiences. In 2024, visitors to national park units spent $29 billion within 60 miles of a park — concentrated in places like West Yellowstone, Springdale, Estes Park, Moab, and Cortez. These towns are at the end of long drives, and the business model assumes people are willing to make them.

I think more local camping will see a surge if trips get shorter. Even with reservation frustrations, rising fees, and the well-documented NPS campground availability issues, camping is still the cheapest multi-night option for a family by a wide margin. A weekend at a state park campground is a steal compared to a weekend at a chain hotel within an hour of any major outdoor destination. If you want to predict where outdoor recreation grows this summer, state parks within drive radius of population centers seem an obvious answer. Whether the systems are funded well enough to handle it is a separate question.

Visitation won’t be down everywhere – plenty of places will still see high/record visitation this summer, matching recent trends. Yosemite is already seeing record visitation so far in 2026, which makes sense, because they dropped entry reservations, it's a few hours from major metros, and driving there is still cheaper than flying anywhere. The parks that are more likely to see fluctuations are the ones with a higher travel/drive commitment.

State tourism budgets are typically focused on capturing high value out-of-state spending — which works in a low-gas-price world where people will drive 12 hours. But with rising prices, the valuable visitor is the one 200 miles away choosing between you and the next state over. South Dakota's tourism secretary Jim Hagen told the Mitchell Republic this month that the state is leaning into its role as a "regional drive market" precisely because higher gas prices are pushing travelers toward closer destinations.

One of the legitimate criticisms of the Legacy Restoration Fund has been its outsized focus on tentpole national parks. Most GAOA money has gone to deferred maintenance at places like Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon rather than expanding capacity or improving park experiences closer to where people actually live. A summer where long-haul travel is getting harder is exactly when you'd want federal investment flowing toward regional trailheads, campgrounds, and access points within a few hours of population centers. Instead, this administration is cutting the programs that fund them and hasn't proposed anything to replace them. The case for regional outdoor infrastructure is at its strongest. Nobody in a position to act on it is making it.

The thing that bothers me about The Great American Road Trip is that it asks people to do something the administration is simultaneously making harder. Gas is at a four-year seasonal high because of a war the administration started. International tourism is down because of anti-US sentiment, fee changes and visa policies. The public lands that inspire millions of road trips are having their staff gutted, funding nixed, and being opened to increased extraction.

I’m all for encouraging people to travel and experience different sides of the US. Road trips are a great way to do that. But the show, featuring the Transportation Secretary, isn't tied to a single piece of policy that would make it easier or more enjoyable to do so. No expanded campground funding, no infrastructure for rural tourism or EV travel, no additional support for state parks as a lower-cost alternative. It's vapid, tone-deaf promotion without investment.

What you have instead is a Toyota-sponsored reality show telling people that to “love America is to see America”, produced by the same administration whose policies are making seeing America more expensive than it's been in years.