PART II.—RECREATION LAND USE ISSUES 
A growing population and growing personal disposable income 
have created and will continue to create increased pressure on our 
land resources for recreation. 
In many cases demand for various forms of residential, industrial, 
and commercial development is converging on the same lands needed 
for recreation. There is a strong rationale for insuring that lands for 
public recreation uses will remain available. The need for an effective 
recreational land-use policy has long been apparent. 
The papers within deal with two aspects of these problems. 
The first deals with the shortage of shoreline recreational lands 
and the second deals with various user pricing policies. 
A. THE Crisis IN SHORELINE RECREATION LANDS 
(by Dennis W. Ducsik, MIT) 
ABSTRACT 
Our Nation today faces a crisis in shoreline recreation. It has come 
about because a mushrooming demand for the unique and relatively 
scarce resources of the coastal zone has far outstripped the available 
supply. We have allowed a pattern of economic growth and devel- 
opment in the coastal zone to continue unchecked for the past 300 
years, so that now we find that only a small percentage of the entire 
shoreline is in public hands for recreation. The problems of pollution 
and erosion have combined with the increasing tendency of private 
owners to restrict public access so that the supply of available shore- 
line, limited to begin with, is shrinking steadily. Yet the demands are 
increasing at a breakneck pace. The multiplicative effects of increasing 
population, income, leisure time, and mobility are expected to bring 
about a tripling in the demand for outdoor recreation by the turn 
of the century. Yet the facilities are saturated today with hordes of 
users, while there is little or no room for expansion within the existing 
economic and political environment. 
This serious problem has materialized because of the serious 
deficiencies in our present allocative mechanisms of the private 
market and local political decisionmaking. Analysis has shown how 
these mechanisms fail to provide an efficient allocation of certain 
valuable resources in particular circumstances. These circumstances 
include (1) the inability of the price system to determine and articu- 
late the true costs and benefits to society associated with a particular 
good and (2) the tendency of local political bodies to make decisions 
based on effects that are net benefits to the local community but not 
to the regional society. 
A new framework for coastal zone management is proposed that 
places the prime responsibility for shoreline regulation in the hands 
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57-242—71—_8 
