I just did a quick look at our books, and our cart revenue is approximately 1/3 of what our greens fees and season passes generate.
So it sounds like under the current pricing, cart fees are about 25%-ish of your revenue. I'd guess that represents a slight subsidy of the walkers but not enough to matter much. In other words, the walkers are paying about what it takes to cover the cost of providing them the golf course and the cart riders are paying about what it costs to provide the golf course and a cart.
So combining what Joe, Brad and Cary are saying here's my understanding of the situation. In the public course market, a major function of golf carts are to segment the market for tee times by price. Those who are most price sensitive tend to walk and pay the Green Fee while those who are willing to pay more tend to ride and pay Green Fee + Cart Fee. Sort of like my $400 airline ticket (with restrictions) versus the business traveller's $900 ticket (unrestricted).
If everyone actually wanted to ride and the only reason to walk was to save money, that arrangement would work perfectly. It fails to work perfectly only to the extent that there are some public-course players whose desire to walk or ride is not based on price. For instance, someone who must use a cart due to physical circumstances has to pay the higher price or not play at all. That's one imperfection in that model. The other imperfection is that someone like me who always walks is never going to have to pay the higher price so the walkers on average may not be paying as much as they'd be willing to and therefore the least price-sensitive among them may get a "good deal" (by their reckoning).
This is a very helpful thread for my understanding of the local situation I've experienced here in South Carolina. As Sean mentioned, most public and semi-private courses around here will not let you walk on weekends. Weekend morning tee times are the scarcest commodity for a public course and in a perfect market would therefore command the highest prices. Basically, the course owners are conflating the premium people are willing to pay for weekend morning access and the premium they are willing to pay for riding in a cart and just force-fitting those two together.
That does not explain the most frustrating part of the arrangement, though. The courses around here who do not allow walking will not let me walk the course (on weekends at least)
even if I'm willing to pay the extra cart fee. I've been given the usual "slow play" excuse which I'm not going to waste time refuting but I've also been hit with a more elaborate reason. At one erstwhile home course of mine a few years back (a semi-private) they outlawed walking and would not let me pay the cart fee and still walk. The reasoning was that if other people saw me walking, they would want to walk too and they would bitch about having the pay the cart fee even though they weren't using the cart.
Here's where Cary's point comes into play. That course sold a lot of its weekday tee times in blocks to vacation tour operators. The deal was that the tour operator provides tee times at a course per day to visitors from out of town for one packaged price. Then the golf course collects a Cart Fee (which in that case was inflated, something like $30/round) from each visitor. So naturally, they don't allow them to walk and avoid paying the $30 or else the course would be giving away its tee times for free (they collected only a very nominal overall fee from the tour operator). What was happening was as long as the visitors thought the course was "carts only" they were happy to pay both the tour operator and the golf course, making their total outlay at least as much as the cost of a walk-up Green Fee + Cart Fee. But if they caught sight of a walking golfer, they thought they ought to be able to walk and save a few bucks.
So what Cary is talking about is marketing access to the golf course based on either an unrealistically low Green Fee or various "free" or packaged rounds that require the payment of a day-of-play Cart Fee. I've always said if the Green Fee is $40 and the Cart Fee is $20 and carts are required, then that's a $60 golf course. Yet some people will think of that as "a $40 golf course", which has always mystified me. I guess the idea is to create an image in golfer's minds of the game being cheaper than it actually is with the Cart Fee just being something you have to pay for along the way like clubs or balls or beer.
This has all been very enlightening. I've had a sense that I'm beating my head against the wall in trying to find rational walking policies at public courses. This explains the source of my frustration, once a certain proportion of golfers come to expect riding in a cart to be an automatic part of the game the rest is just freshman economics. It's a situation where a minority preference (walking) is indistinguishable by the market from a simple price preference (cheapness). That's why I have to spend several thousand dollars a year to be a member of a Country Club when there are fine golf courses all over my area that can be played on a daily-fee basis for half that much if you're willing to ride in a cart on weekends.
P.S. That last statement just made me think of something. Under the system I've described, the walkers who are actually cheapskates will walk at public courses. The walkers who are
not cheapskates will be
forced to move upmarket and join a private club where walking is always allowed. Curse you, invisible hand!