engleski

Modelling heterogeneity in trail users’ perception of crowding in a peri-urban nature park

Crowding is an important factor that affects visitors’ experience in green areas. Existing nature parks and outdoor recreation surveys rely heavily on single-item scales to measure visitors’ perception of crowding. However, such scale ignores the complexity of crowding phenomenon, which varies with various social, psychological and situational factors. To deal with this issue, the discrete choice experiment (DCE) and BWS (best-worst scaling) methods were used to simultaneously address various factors that affect trail users’ (n=249) preferences and perception of crowding in the Medvednica Nature Park. The results of mixed logit model indicated that crowding on trail is more important characteristic of trail experience than trail condition, intensity of road traffic, forest landscape and educational signage ; however, trail users were willing to tolerate relatively high levels of crowding. A significant unobserved preference heterogeneity was found for the very crowded situation on trail. The possible sources of this heterogeneity were investigated within an additional BWS experiment. The occupancy of mountain huts, number of other hikers on the trail and amount of litter along the trail contributed most to the trail users’ perception of crowding. However, the latent class analysis identified large heterogeneity in their perception ; one group of trail users was more disturbed by the direct social impacts, and other by the secondary impacts of other visitors. Identifying the factors that affect visitors’ perception of crowding the most and the heterogeneity in the perception of crowding offers a valuable information to park management in dealing with increased recreation use.

Best-worst scaling ; Discrete choice ; Perception of crowding ; Preference heterogeneity

nije evidentirano