Determinants of demand for recreational walking trails in Ireland

The purpose of this work is to explore how recreational walkers' marginal willingness to pay for, or travel to, Irish trails is affected by trail attributes. We use principal components data reduction, z-score data normalization, and OLS regression analyses on two stated preference datasets covering 302 Irish and foreign visitors, and recreational experts, across 15 sites in Ireland between 2005 and 2010. Findings reveal that endowment and infrastructure attributes emerge as primary influences affecting demand. In particular, flat or valley-endowed trails, and infrastructure, including signage, amenities, and maps or leaflets positively affect demand. Additionally, robustness checks suggest farmer access agreements may also be important. On the other hand, we find that mountain or hill, forest, and coastal or lake trails, as well as income, seem to be negatively associated with demand. Finally, we are able to use these in-sample results to extrapolate demand for a set of new relatively unimproved trails in an out-of-sample demand prediction exercise.