A more natural Yosemite With 7,000 cars arriving on busy days, Yosemite has sometimes seemed more like a parking lot than a national park. But a blueprint unveiled last week by the National Park Service would reduce vehicle traffic, restore parts of the Yosemite Valley to a more natural state, and make the park more accessible to hikers and bikers by 2001. Officials will seek public comment on the plan, which would remove roads, bridges, and parking lots and relocate some facilities outside the park. Many visitors would ride in alternative-fuel buses. Fewer and fewer of Yosemite's 4 million annual visitors would simply be watching from the family car.
Republicans retook the only open congressional seat and retained two governorships.
But dozens of Democratic mayors swept to re-election. Taxes, everywhere, equaled death at the voting booth. He won 62 percent of the vote. In New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman barely defeated an unknown state legislator who tapped into voter anger over high auto insurance rates. Virginia's former attorney general, James Gilmore, whipped auto dealer and Lt. Gov. Donald Beyer by promising to eliminate a yearly car tax.