Dylan Lowrance, 4, heads toward her friends after a dip in Donner Lake at West End Beach in Truckee in April. Truckee officials are imposing new rules on the Donner Lake area to manage the spikes of weekend visitors.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
Truckee is enacting new measures at Donner Lake to better manage traffic and travel during busy summer weekends.
Gregory Thomas/S.F. Chronicle
“No Parking” signs along Donner Pass Road alert motorists that citation amounts have risen to $150.
Gregory Thomas/S.F. Chronicle
Boulders line the perimeter of Donner Pass Road to prevent illegal parking along the Donner Lake shoreline.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
Visitors enjoy public docks along Donner Pass Road in April at Donner Lake in Truckee.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
One of the Sierra’s favorite alpine lake getaways is getting a host of new rules for visitors — just in time for the busy summer season.
Like many mountain escapes that beckon weekend visitors from the Central Valley and Bay Area, Donner Lake can become chaotic in the summertime. Carloads of families hoping to score a coveted parking spot by the water’s edge, trucks lining up trailers to launch at boat ramps, construction crews carrying out seasonal road work, dog walkers, bicyclists, kayakers — everyone gets funneled onto the 3-mile stretch of Donner Pass Road along the lake’s northern shore.
“It’s just a really big recipe for conflict,” said Truckee Town Council Member Dave Polivy.
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The town counted more than 200 vehicle collisions at the lake from 2020 to 2025 as well as two pedestrian fatalities and a lot of near misses. Last year, traffic counters tallied nearly 300,000 unique vehicles in the Donner Lake area.
Truckee is enacting new measures at Donner Lake to better manage traffic and travel during busy summer weekends.
Gregory Thomas/S.F. Chronicle
To quell the chaos, Truckee plans to strongly tamp down speeding and illegal parking.
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People have been taking the 35-mph road — which has no sidewalks and tight turn-ins to driveways — at 50 mph. A town report found that speeding was the top factor in collisions at the lake. So the council voted to reduce speed limits at Donner to 30 mph beginning this season. Workers will also soon paint in thicker, more obvious bike lane stripes, narrowing traffic lanes in the hopes people will drive more cautiously.
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“The goal is to slow people down,” Polivy said. “We’re not trying to raise revenue for the police department.”
Illegal parking is the other big headache.
Probably only a couple of hundred parking spaces near the lake are available to day visitors, who can sometimes number in the thousands, and desperate drivers tend to wedge vehicles into places where they don’t belong, often blocking a bike lane on the edge of the roadway.
Truckee has installed 200 boulders at the lake’s edge in hopes of curbing illegal parking ahead of peak tourist season.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
New luggage-size boulders along Donner Pass Road seek to prevent this. The town recently deposited 200 of them, neatly spaced along the dirt shoulder. “No Parking” signs have been posted everywhere, alerting motorists that citation amounts have risen to $150 — more than four times the previous $35 fee.
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“Parking infractions were at a level where people coming here were willing to accept the cost, so we need to make them significantly more painful,” Polivy said. “Hey people, we don’t want you parking in the bike lane. We’re going to ticket you more aggressively.”
Donner Pass Road will be “treated as a Maximum Enforcement Area” with increased police presence, according to the town’s website.
Locals say the pandemic supercharged tourism at Donner, and they now see huge spikes of visitors. This year’s changes are desperately needed, some residents say.
At a Truckee town hearing last year, an older man who said he lived on Donner Pass Road described almost being hit by speeding cars in front of his home. “It is severely damaging to your health to live in a situation when you’re constantly being frightened by traffic,” he said.
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Another resident spoke up: “We need to remember that this is not just a vacation place, but this is a residential neighborhood and we need to start treating it that way. … We need to understand that we truly have a problem.”
Those conversations spurred the town to enact the new measures.
When asked what he’d recommend to hopeful weekend visitors this summer, Polivy highlighted Truckee’s alternative transit options: the on-demand TART Connect service that functions like a free ride-hail around town; the local bus route that runs between downtown Truckee and Donner Lake Memorial State Park; and the town’s e-bike rental program.
Truckee is imposing strict measures to control crowds around Donner Lake during tourist season.
Gregory Thomas, S.F. Chronicle
“I don’t think we would have made these changes if we didn’t have modes for people to equitably access this area,” Polivy said.
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This week, local Jeanne Appelbaum walked her dog along the south side of the lake — opposite Donner Pass Road. She gave up on walking on the high-traffic roadway, she said, “because of how dangerous it’s gotten” with speeding vehicles.
Appelbaum said she agreed with the new traffic measures but wondered whether the crackdown on parking specifically would have unforeseen consequences — or perhaps even make traffic worse.
“I don’t know where people will park now — but they’ll park somewhere,” Appelbaum said. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens.”