Needed Improvements in Recreation Benefit Estimation

ABSTRACT

The increasing significance of recreation to project and program options involving public resources, the mounting attention given to benefit-cost analysis, and the development of substantial improvements in the procedures f or estimating recreation demand call for use of improved recreation benefit estimation procedures. Evaluation of the commonly-used interim unit day value approach for estimating recreation benefits indicates that it should be replaced by predictive models based on the travel cost and survey methods. These models estimate the willingness of users to pay for the use of recreation resources.

KEYWORDS:

• Outdoor recreation
• benefits
• willingness to pay
• economics
• benefit cost
• unit day values
• travel cost models
• survey models