I'm in Atlantic Beach, NC at the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council's Scientific and Statistical Committee meeting. I've got beaches and fishing on my mind.
A new beach is born down at the other end of this island [Now Visitors can get to the Point (not the, The Point at Cape Hatteras)]:
The western tip of Emerald Isle* that had been wiped out by erosion is now restored, allowing people and their cars to return to a popular recreation area for the first time in six years.
The area commonly called The Point had been gobbled up by the meandering channel of Bogue Inlet. The town reclaimed it, spending $11.4 million last year to move the channel west and pump sand onto the beach.
Now four-wheel-drive vehicles plow through acres of white sand where boats once navigated deep water. Huge sandbags that armored the shoreline to protect a row of beach houses from the tides are now up to 700 feet from the water's edge.
Hmmm. The cost is $11.4m. I wonder what the benefits might be. As it turns out, I've recently estimated a really, really cool ... I'm pumped ... shore (beach and piers) fishing model for NC. I might be able to trick it into coming up with the value of a new fishing site.
*Note: the southern NC beaches run east-west.
To do this, I took away the closest shore fishing site on Emerald Isle and estimated that the cost per angler trip of this lost opportunity is $0.50. Assuming that the cost of a lost site and the benefit of an additional site are roughly equal (gulp), I aggregate the benefit over the number of annual shore angler trips in NC, about 4 million. The annual benefit of the new site is $2 million. Discount into perpetuity at 10% and the present value of benefits are $20 million.
Present value net benefits = $20 million - $11.4 million = $8.6 million. OK, it looks efficient enough.
Appendix (here's my model [a first on this blog!]):
- 1905 anglers
- 50 sites (22 piers, 28 beaches)
- Nested logit: mode/site choice
- Independent variables: travel cost, catch rate (square root), beach width
- Results (coefficients)
- travel cost = -0.04
- catch rate = 0.60
- beach width = 0.005
- inclusive value = 0.54
