Do user fees exclude low-income people from resource-based recreation?

A mail survey of New Hampshire and Vermont households shows that although u ser fees are widely accepted, they may substantially reduce participation i n resource-based recreation by those earning less than $30,000 per year. Fo r example, 23% of low-income respondents indicated that they had either red uced 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 su ggests 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 pu blic lands would affect about 49% of low-income people as compared to 33% o f high-income respondents. We conclude that potential impacts of this magni tude highlight several critical problems in the design of recreation fee pr ograms.