Economics of limiting congestion in urban forest recreation areas

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a contingent valuation for evaluating environmental quality in the Atatü rk Urban Forest of Bursa, Turkey. The environmental quality parameter under investigation at this recreational site is congestion. Congestion is an important externality having impacts on visitors' welfare at this site. Two distinct models were employed in this study. A qualitative response model was employed to find covariate effects depending on shifting congestion levels. The other model used was the survivor model. The survivor model brings new insights to congestion pricing literature to find the mean willingness to pay for shifting congestion levels changing from level-I to level-V. It is a useful method for congestion pricing when covariate impacts are not important for the analyst. According to the survivor model results, respondents evaluated congestion level-I, which is the lowest congestion level, with an amount of USD 32.08 per visit. The value of congestion level-V, which is highest congestion level, was USD 4.34 per visit. If these amounts are aggregated into total visit rates, they correspond to USD 2,245,600 and USD 303,800 for congestion levels-I and V, respectively. Differences between these values are welfare losses of this public good. The outcomes of this paper may help policy-makers resolve environmental management issues.

Governance of Forest Recreation in Urban Areas: Analysing the role of stakeholders and institutions using the institutional analysis and development framework

“…This is due to the trend of outdoor activities and outdoor recreation lifestyles becoming an important element of daily life for urban and rural populations (Mann and Absher, 2008). Gürlük et al, 2012;Matsiori et al, 2012) and the preferences of forest users (e.g. The literature on forest recreation deals mainly with the economic valuation of forest recreation (e.g.…”

Economic evaluation of a prospective Farm Animal Welfare program in Turkey

“…As known, investigated public good's features are not explained completely to respondents in telephone surveys. The rate of return of mailed surveys is quite low (Gürlük et al, 2012). The surveys for this study were carried out either on the farms or in the Union office.…”

“…Therefore, it produced a total of 1764 observations from a total of 294 surveys in the panels by taking two responses from any one respondent, according to the double-bounded technique (Gürlük et al, 2012). We may express those panels for shifting FAW levels by replicating Equation (3) in Equation ( 4).…”

Outdoor recreation planning and management considering FROS and carrying capacities: a case study of forest wetland in Yeongam-gum, South Korea

“…Among these, the strategies of the restriction of facilities in order to reduce congestion can be extended or replaced in other ways. According to Gürlük et al (2012), they proposed a policy to resource enlarging policy as well as visitation restriction policy to optimal carrying capacities for urban forests. However, this may not be suitable as a sustainable urban forest management because it is accompanied by additional land development or nature destruction.…”

“…This approach can be easily applied to policy-makers by presenting speci c limitations (i.e., maximum occupancy of visitors) and establishing season-based differentiation (i.e., peak season, off-season, weekdays, and weekends). Since the results related to social capacity (social CC) are highly related perceived congestion, it is necessary to specify the appropriate capacity by referring existing papers which veri ed congestion decreases visitors' welfare(Douglas and Johnson, 1992;Gürlük, 2012;Gürlük et al, 2012;León et al, 2015). Based on the results of Gürlük et al…”