Bicycle tourism is one of the popular physical activities for sport tourists. Since the physical environment may affect bicycling behavior, it becomes an important determinant for cyclists to choose a cycleway. Exploratory factor analysis is performed to extract the perception of environmental quality of cyclists into five main factors, including safety, light facilities, lane design, landscape, and environment cleanliness. The contingent behavior method (CBM) is adopted to measure the quality improvement projects in different scenarios of light facility and landscape improvement. The results showed that the improvement projects increased the intended number of trips and the recreational benefits of cyclists.
Landscape is an important element in outdoor sports recreation. Cyclists’ perception of an environment reflects their interaction with the actual environment; they become aware of the recreation site through their primary receptive senses. As one popular bikeway in Taiwan, the landscape along Dong-Feng bikeway appeals to many cyclists. Nevertheless, the landscape was spoiled due to a soil conservation project. This study follows the theorem of planned behavior (TPB) and applies contingent behavior scenario to evaluate the recreational benefits and the damage effect of landscape. The empirical model uses travel cost method (TCM) to estimate the consumer surplus of cyclists. Under the scenario of damaged landscape, the number of trips went down 1.01 times and the recreational benefit dropped to NT$750, making the cost of damaging the landscape to NT$132 per person. The result indicates that the landscape of environment quality is crucial to cyclists, and it is important to preserve the natural environment of bike paths for developing the sport tourism sustainability.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.