| Urban rivers are an important component of the city waterfront tourism resources of. As income level rises, the demand for short distance travel also increases. However, the sites for short distance travel are limited. Rigid supply and unlimited demand bring a series of problem. Because too many tourist sites are overflowing with people during holiday seasons, urban river travel has become a pressing matter.All along the rivers have not gained the attention of the tourism-related enterprises, but the river is closely linked to people’s lives. With the increasing scarcity of urban land resources, if we can develop the rivers to become leisure gathering places; to some extent we can meet the short distance recreational needs and can alleviate the problem of over crowdedness. Hangzhou is a water-based tourist city. The city hall and municipal Party Committee highly value the importance of the water tourism development in Hangzhou. The river tourism development has an important strategic role in the government’s suggestion of developing Hangzhou into a "Five Water Guide"(river, sea, river, creek, lake) Landscape City. Valuation of tourism resources has been the focus and difficulty of Environmental Resources and Tourism research. The assessment of the tourism resources is an important reference to this market development.Using Hangzhou’s channel as example, this article employs the questionnaire survey method, empirical analysis, quantitative research methods, field survey, and literature analysis method to obtain first-hand information. It draws a conclusion through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis of data; and model building.This article constructs the recreational value classification system. In a broad sense, the value of recreation can be divided into use (usable) and non-use (non-usable) values. The non-usable value contains the option value, the existence value and the heritage value. The recreational value of the rivers is the sum of the usable and the non-usable values. The article uses individual travel cost method (ITCM) to evaluate the usable value and the contingent valuation method (CVM) to assess the non-usable value of the rivers in Hangzhou City.Through calculation, we have arrived at the amount of7.44257billion yuans in2012for usable value. The non-usable value of637.27million yuans includes118.53million in option value,344.13million in existence value, and174.61million in heritage value. Through investigation and analysis, the article draws the conclusion as follows:1. There is still a lot of room for utilizing and protecting Hangzhou’s rivers. From the10items in the survey done by tourists, the worst is the quality of the water. As for air quality, landscape, traffic location, water scenery, environment, health, bridges and piers, ferries, museum, ecological protection, and the water taxis, most of the evaluations stay at satisfactory and have not reached the very satisfactory level. So there is still a long way to go to develop Hangzhou’s rivers to become the best tourism resources.2. Rivers Hangzhou’s rivers should be the personal garden for the regular residents. Through survey, we found that the people who usually visit the urban waterfront are regular residents, especially the elderly. In addition to the canals, it is more meaningful to use the river courses in Hangzhou City as a place for relaxation for it’s residents.3. The ITCM date helps to improve the accuracy of CVM. The past CVM survey did not distinguish between local and non-local people. Without taking into consideration the difference in familiarity of the tourist sites between the local and the non-local, the calculation is clearly not accurate enough. Because the local can more objectively evaluate, this study needs to eliminate those who lived in the city for less than half a year and just survey the regular residents who live there for more than half a year. In that case, the WTP data will carry a higher reference value, making the CVM results more accurate. |
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