Managing Routes and Trails - Tourism and Trails: Cultural, Ecological and Management Issues - page 235

Visitor Management Frameworks and Procedures
Visitor management of public spaces by agencies responsible for them has
changed over time, from a 'leave us alone' approach, where managing the
resource took precedence over users, to a new mode of thinking where visi-
tors are considered stakeholders, who are recognized as co-owning the
resource and are valued guests (Hall & McArthur, 1998; Hall & Lew, 2009).
A favorite approach was to estimate an area's carrying capacity, a concept
that came from wildlife management and was effectively adopted by recre-
ation and tourism researchers. The concept essentially was not about estab-
lishing numbers but rather thresholds of use to determine limits before any
negative effects would occur. It has evoked considerable research since
Wagar's (1964) pioneering study and remains to this day a popular manage-
rial concept. It is, however, flawed as it is not about numbers, but under-
standing that levels of use will vary from location to location and that
variables such as the season, the type of activity involved and the physical
and social characteristics of the setting must all be understood collectively to
establish levels of use that are acceptable to the majority. Managers still rec-
ognize the need to oversee the risks associated with recreation and tourism,
and that requires them to manage their users. Alternative ways to govern
users have emerged over the past three and half decades, ranging from visitor
frameworks that emphasize the 'opportunities' sites offer, as well as those
that focus on imposing 'limits of use'. This section presents a brief synopsis
of some of these visitor management frameworks and examines the extent
to which they have utility in managing linear recreation and tourism spaces.
Managing opportunity
Opportunity spectrums have been around for more than three decades,
but they have received more attention from scholars than managers. The
first one developed was the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (ROS) by
researchers at the US Forest Service who were exploring alternative uses of
forest lands for wilderness recreation (Clark & Stankey, 1979). The ROS was
based on three principles. First, they adopted a behavioral approach in defin-
ing the recreation setting through a combination of physical, biological,
social and managerial attributes. Second, they developed a spectrum of what
they termed 'opportunity setting classes', which ranged from primitive,
semi-primitive and semi-modern, to modern. Third, they identified a set of
management factors (access, non-recreational resource uses, onsite manage-
ment, social interaction, acceptability of visitor impacts and acceptable regi-
mentation) against which they identified acceptable combinations for
opportunities for each setting class within their spectrum range. The ROS
proved attractive to managers of natural heritage resources (i.e. parks)
because the framework offered a high degree of flexibility where