Planning and Developing Trails and Routes - Tourism and Trails: Cultural, Ecological and Management Issues - page 213

countries, and the willingness to put in place the necessary legislation to
facilitate a range of specific types of trail programs that offer users a mix of
trails and routes in terms of the types of activities they can participate in
when accessing each. The importance of the policy arena ties back to the
conceptual model in Chapter 1 (Figure 1.1) that placed the wider macro
policy environment as the foundation to which other aspects relate, includ-
ing obviously supply, but also scale, demand, type of impact and, which is
the attention of the next chapter, how they are managed.
We have been deliberate in our effort to balance discussion on planning
and development processes against the practical elements that go into design-
ing trails and routes, cognizant that the nuances of design must take into
consideration the uniqueness of place and time. Not all trails will garner the
same degree of interest and therefore have to endure similar levels of pres-
sure. Over time, many trails and routes will experience ebbs and flows in use
levels and the specifics of how trails continue to be planned and developed
will take into account these basic geographic aspects. Use levels obviously
will vary between nature trails or those that have a deliberate cultural heri-
tage focus to them and this should not deter the development of the former;
instead, how environments respond to varying levels of pressure is in essence
in the end an essential management problem.
It has become more fashionable today to discount the numbers involved
in recreation and tourism within environments, in this case, trails and
routes, and stress that it is not a numbers problem but rather a management
one. Page (2012) recently introduced the concept of 'managed tourism' in
reference to the overly-used concept of 'sustainable tourism'. And so it is to
how we effectively manage trails and routes that attention shifts in the next
chapter, examining how we protect, maintain and monitor their usage and
impacts.