Nature-based outdoor recreation trips: Duration, travel mode and location

This paper studies the allocation of time to outdoor recreation trips in various natural environment types. We merge a multiple discrete-continuous demand system for time allocation with a discrete choice model for destination and travel-mode choice. Accessibility enters the time allocation model through the logsum of the travel mode/destination choice stage. The model is estimated on data for the Netherlands, which was gathered through an activity diary approach that covers one entire year. Our model shows that personal characteristics, household characteristics, contextual variables and accessibility all augment the allocation of time to the set of natural environment types. The resulting estimates allow us to evaluate outdoor recreation policy initiatives, and we simulate the impact of changes in the availability of natural environment types with a constrained optimization approach. We show that time allocation changes are rather small with our simulated policy initiative, but have the intended effect on the group of consumers which the policy initiative aims for.