Monday, September 6, 2010

Commercial Recreational Boating Analysis

The MARIN Group is working to quantify commercial recreational boating activity in the Canadian Coast Guard’s Search and Rescue regions around Atlantic Canada and the St. Lawrence Seaway, and to obtain information regarding the type and amount of activity, and characteristics of the vessels. This information was obtained by conducting a phone survey of all businesses in this region that offer commercial recreational boating services, yeilding a response rate of 70% of those in operation.


The completed surveys were split into three separate groups for data creation and analysis: Single-boat Tours, Multi-boat Tours, and Boat Rentals. Single boat tours are tours where passengers all travel on one boat whereas Multi-boat Tours are tours where passengers travel on multiple boats in a group, such as a kayaking tour. The graph on the right shows the number of operations that were active in each month of the year.



MARIN is currently working on a temporal and spatial model of commercial recreational boating traffic in Eastern Canada. Representative schedules of commercial recreational boating operations were generated from information garnered from the surveys. From this, traffic was generated in MARIS. The figure on the right shows the traffic densities in the Maritimes for one year. The darker grid squares represent higher traffic density.