Do User Fees Exclude Low-income People from Resource-based Recreation?

Abstract

A mail survey of New Hampshire and Vermont households shows that although user fees are widely accepted, they may substantially reduce participation in resource-based recreation by those earning less than $30,000 per year. For example, 23% of low-income respondents indicated that they had either reduced use or gone elsewhere as a result of recent fee increases, while only 11% of high-income users had made such changes. A conjoint analysis also suggests that low-income respondents are much more responsive to access fees than high-income respondents. And we find that a $5 daily fee for use of public lands would affect about 49% of low-income people as compared to 33% of high-income respondents. We conclude that potential impacts of this magnitude highlight several critical problems in the design of recreation fee programs.