260 FOREST OUTINGS 



and $1,000 per year spends only about $20 for all forms of recreation and 

 $60 for transportation in a year. 



Consider what this means in terms of a family of four, the most common 

 consumer unit. The head of the family generally will have to pay street- 

 car or bus fare to and from his job. The greater number of working days, 

 the more fares he will have to pay. The wife will expend at a minimum 

 several dollars in transportation during the course of a year. The children 

 may have no private transportation cost getting to school, but they will do 

 some traveling outside of school hours. When all this is added, it is easy to 

 see how $60 can be spent for family transportation without leaving any- 

 thing over for pleasure trips. 



Again, the $20 which is the average annual recreation budget has to 

 be distributed over 365 days. This allows only 5% cents a day for the whole 

 family's recreation. Even a movie is a strain on such a budget. The normal 

 cost of stopping in the forest would be prohibitive, even if the cost of reach- 

 ing the forest did not generally present an almost insuperable obstacle. 



That is the first cost of forest recreation transportation. With four 

 people in a car, the cost, including gas, oil, maintenance, and depreciation 

 averages around 6 cents a mile, or \ l / 2 cents a person per mile. The lowest 

 railroad coach rate is 2% cents a mile; the average bus rate is 1% cents a 

 mile. And neither railroad nor bus would generally leave a person precisely 

 at the picnic ground, campground, or other development that he might 

 want to visit. Groups may occasionally hire a bus at reduced rates; this is 

 being done more and more. But by no means now known is it possible to 

 cut individual transportation costs to the forest much below 1% cents a 

 mile. 



Assuming a transportation charge of 6 cents a mile for a group of four, 

 a table in the appendix indicates how the population of this country 

 is distributed with respect to the cost of getting to the nearest national- 

 forest boundary and back. The national forests are more widely distributed 

 than any other public lands. But most of them are "far from the madding 

 crowd" at its thickest, so far that only about one-third of the population 

 of this country can make the round trip to any national forest for less than 

 $10; and for another one-third the transportation cost will be more than $20. 



