Using vehicular traffic count data to estimate the factors driving water-based recreation use in northwestern Ontario, Canada

Abstract

Within Canada's publicly owned forests (i.e., Crown forests), little information is available about how and when people use lakes and rivers for recreation. I report an example of using traffic monitoring to identify both the spatial and temporal patterns of water-based recreational trips for a set of lakes in northwestern Ontario, Canda. To gather recreational trip data, monitoring devices were strategically located along roads and trails that access lakes. I used information about the lakes, roads and trails and user days to help examine variations in spatial and temporal patterns of recreation demand. A fixed effects negative binomial regression model was used to estimate the effect of physical and temporal attributes on daily traffic counts at the water-based sites.