the total segment length (in miles and linear feet)
the total length of constrained areas in that segment
the number of bridges in each segment
the number of culverts in each segment
the number of road crossings in this segment
the cost to construct a natural surface trail ($/linear foot)
the cost to construct a general compacted gravel trail
the cost to construct a general paved trail
the cost of maintenance (per year per linear foot)

This information will be used in determining the cost of paving your trail or the cost of construction of your trail. It’s also helpful for looking at what accommodations would need to be made if there were to be an actual path where the plan indicated. To begin the calculation you will want to make a chart on excel that looks something like this to fill your data in:

Figure 1
Next, we looked at the capacity of each town by recording the following:

accommodations (number of rooms)
number of gas stations
number of food stores
number of food services
number of recreation/entertainment
number of retail stores
the average amount a visitor spends at each of the above
the average amount a local spends at each of the above

We found all of this data collectively in the Dean Runyan Oregon Travel Impacts Report which can be found in for the state of Oregon:
Figure 2
We graphed this data on the same spreadsheet as the data above like so:
Figure 3
Note that the average amount a local spends at the activities listed above, are collective rather than by each individual activity like visitor spending. In researching, we are not always provided with all of the data you’ve intended on gathering therefore when a problem like this is presented it is always good to look back on economic theory to figure out a legitimate way to work around this.

With this data, we calculated two things; local user benefits and visitor user benefits. This is used to analyze how much revenue is coming into each town through the trail by use of locals and by use of visitors to compare and contrast to the costs of building and maintaining the trail. This will help us determine is constructing a trail will be feasible or not. For this calculation and analysis we collected the following data:

population in each segment (easiest is segments are broken up by city)
percent of population who utilize walking paths in the county (?)
**average amount of local dollars spent as a result of using the trail (per month)

The data in the last bullet for our particular project was simply not available therefore as a group, we discussed assuming what we depicted as a “safe” amount of dollars a typical local eastern oregon trail user would spend a month. In our case, we had assumed that a typical trail user would spend approximately $5 a month on stuff like coffee, food, spare bike tires, etc. From this information we are able to calculate an estimate of current revenue that could potentially be generated from these activities locally. To get a scope of how much additional revenue that could be potentially brought in from the trail, we assumed a 1%, 3%, 5% increase of the calculated value to get a broader scope of the possible additional benefits. Our data was collected and calculated in excel like so:

Figure 4
The last piece of data we collected was the benefits that trail users or visitors would bring to surrounding communities of the trail. Combining this visitor benefit with the local benefit calculated above, can be combined with the costs to determine an approximate net total cost or benefit of the construction and use of the trail. We collected the following data for this calculation:

number of visitors in each city (measured by county hotel taxes)
percent of recreational visitors in your area (usually by county)
average amount of visitor dollars spent in Eastern Oregon (your area) per month

For the first bullet, we did not have sufficient information available at a county level due to the rural area that we are located in so we had to do some further calculations to come up with the number of potential visitors in each city. We figured that we could measure the amount of visitors that pass through each city by collecting data from hotels using their county hotel taxes which is data we were able to collect. To obtain the amount of visitors each segment would potentially receive we would have to multiply the hotel tax by the number of hotel in each city, however the cities that we are collecting data for, some of them don’t have hotels in them therefore we collected the ratio of restaurants in each city because we assumed that if a visitor came into town to stay overnight, he/she would probably go and get something to eat at a restaurant at one point in their visit. Therefore, we multiplied the hotel tax by the ratio of restaurants (city/county) to obtain the approximate number of visitors to each city. We then used the percent of recreational visitors in our county which was obtained from the Dean Runyan report (Figure __) and multiplied this number by the number of visitors expected to visit each city and calculated the expected number of recreational visitors that currently visit Eastern Oregon. With the approximate number of visitors that currently visit your area or city, you can multiply this number by the average amount each visitor spends and obtain the total amount of what each visitor that visits Eastern Oregon will typically spend in a month. This total added to the total local benefits will give you the total benefits the trail is expected to produce. The same 1%, 3%, 5% assumption is applied with this benefit as it was to the local benefits above. Also, keep in mind that these are all estimates. Our data was collected and calculated in excel.

Next we will be discussing the Data Analysis

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