visitor from consideration. In such a case, he may be
simply seeking a place to stay overnight on the way
to major pleasures elsewhere. In any case, the bundle
of recreational opportunities afforded by most public
facilities have a formidable number of substitutes and
complements in a relevant vicinity. With the
recreationist who takes a bundle of those, along with
the site of interest, is the traveler who enjoys
traveling, itself, whether for the sight-seeing or just
the “moving on.”6
A technique that the writers [5] recommend
involves the use of an adjustment to the
recreationist’s travel costs based on the time actually
spent at a given site relative to his total time away
from home. In other words, count only a fraction of
his total travel cost as the travel expense of recreating
on that site, that fraction being based on the
proportion of his total time spent at the site while
away from home. This admittedly arbitrary
adjustment seems no more arbitrary than using
unadjusted costs in estimating demand from a sample
of recreationists that includes nondestination visitors.
LEISURE-TIME CONSTRAINTS
In conventional demand theory, the consumer’s
welfare-optimizing choice among alternative bundles
of purchases is determined by his tastes and
constrained by his income, the latter expressed as a
monetary budget constraint at given prices of
available goods. It follows that conventional
predictions of consumer behavior rest on projections
of tastes, income, and relative prices. It has been
suggested [3, 6] that leisure-time availability may
constitute a more binding constraint than income on
the quantity purchased of recreation.
Surely, however, not everyone has all the time he
would wish for all the recreation he could afford to
buy. The implications of this for analysis of
recreation demand at a given site need consideration
only if because it has worried a lot of people.7
Three points seem worth raising. First,
consumption of virtually all goods takes time,8 thus
recreation is not unique in this respect. Second,
income and time constraints are inextricably
interrelated for most people. Nearly everyone
performs some kind of work that could be hired out
in exchange for more leisure time; for example,
people who do some of their own home maintenance
work. Third, there is now some empirical evidence
that the income constraint dominates the time
constraint at least in the minds of a typical sample of
state park campground patrons in Florida [5].
Of 357 campers queried as to whether it is the
money cost of recreating or leisure time that
primarily limit their recreation in the state parks,
279, or 78 percent, gave money cost as the answer.
Thirty-five or just under 10 percent cited limited
time. Most of the remaining 43, or 12 percent, could
not make up their minds (a negligible few cited the
two-week limit on state park campground use). In
view of these points it can be suggested that the
leisure time constraint is not as worrisome a problem
as has been imagined.
KUDOS AND CHALLENGES
Having criticized past scholarship, it is time to
rely on it for suggestions of where to go from here.
The following hypotheses seem more or less
confirmed by previous research:
1. Total quantity demanded (Ds), visits per
period (V), and days per visit (Dv), are all
inversely related to on-site costs and to
on-site costs plus travel costs [2,3,4].
2. Total quantity demanded (Ds) and visits per
period (V) are inversely related to travel
costs [2, 3, 4].
3. Days per visit (Dv) are directly related to
travel costs [4].
4. Statistically significant differences exist
between estimated coefficients of travel and
on-site costs when the two of them are
specified as separate independent variables in
any reasonable facsimile of a demand
equation [4].
In view of findings 1,2, and 3, it hardly can be
doubted that the number of visits to and days spent
per visit at a given site are both sensitive to variation
in travel and on-site costs, and that estimates
explaining variation in both components of total
usage should be presented in a complete analysis of
demand.
Findings 2, 3, and 4 caution against the summing
of travel and on-site costs into a single price proxy.
At the same time, having two price proxies for the
6Apportioning travel costs among the myriad recreational motives for travel is about as easy as allocating fixed costs of
a department store among every item of merchandise, the loss leaders included with the fair-traded goods.
η
Wilson [6] presents a way to view the problem in terms of an extension of neo-classical demand theory, in which
recreation is conceived as a produced activity, and draws the interesting, if somewhat implausible conclusion that the question of
proxy prices for a facility may be irrelevant.
8Commodities and services for which there may be option demand constitute a seeming exception.
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