Parks Visitation Data

During these summer months, our parks come alive with activity. Kids excitedly rush to splash pads and swing sets, families gather to celebrate and connect, and many of us enjoy lunchtime or post-work walks to unwind. Our parks are designed to support a wide range of activities, without the need for keys to enter or sign up sheets to use.

This openness is essential for a high-performing public realm, but can prove difficult when it comes to data, especially when it comes to understanding visitation and mobility within a park. Historically, park agencies have struggled there; the process of capturing data in-person or paying for it can be costly, and resources for specialized staffing to then crunch it are often limited. And once you have it, it’s unclear how to even best utilize it. Traditional collection also tends to miss an important slice of the public: the people who aren’t visiting parks.

Yet the benefits are immense. Understanding how a park is used can help practitioners better assess maintenance, programming and long-term capital planning needs. When working towards an equitable system—one where all residents have access to high quality parks, particularly in underserved communities—this information can shine a light on a park’s strengths and shortcomings and provide useful insights about why some parks are popular, and others perhaps lesser so. This focus on equity is driving new data strategies to improve and deepen existing measures to evaluate park systems.  And cities around the U.S are finding new ways to make it work.

Recently, park planners in Denver started to notice something: at a marsh in one of the mountain parks overseen by the city, a steady stream of visitors were using an informal access point at the end of a road to get in and out. The groups, it turns out, were bird-watchers, finding less trafficked areas to spot rare species in the park. The agency then realized it had a potentially high-impact investment opportunity on its hands: formalize the entrance, and more visitors will come.

That discovery was derived by using anonymized cell phone GPS data from Placer.ai for foot traffic analysis. Now, this ‘location intelligence,’ as the company calls it, is allowing park planners in Denver to more easily visualize how people are physically using the city’s parks—social trails where friends go for hikes, or cliffs where teenagers like to hang out—and plan amenities or improvements accordingly.

Colton Rolhoff, the assistant director of capital finance and analytics at Denver Parks and Recreation, said not only does the data help the parks serve the neighborhoods better, but also, it gives agencies a clearer return on investment. “We used to say, ‘Hey, we did all of this public outreach, we provided a service, and we’re done,’” said Rolhoff. “Now we can say: ‘Did it actually work?’”

“Before this, we had no way of quantitatively seeing any change in behavior, or any kind of real return on investment analysis on length of stay,” he continued.

Park visitation data is just one type of information vital to this work. Rolhoff said public input is still essential in park planning—it helps agencies understand their own biases and learn local knowledge that’s not always apparent in the data. He recommends a healthy mix of the two. “The data grounds it all in something quantifiable,” he explained.

That major shift in practice has landed results. In 2018, voters approved a sales tax increase dedicated to a ‘Parks Legacy Fund,’ which was intended for Denver Parks and Recreation to reinvest in underserved communities. To assess its efficacy, the agency pulled cell phone GPS data from 2017 to today, Rolhoff said. 

“We have more than doubled the park usage in those neighborhoods in five years—more than 400,000 active hours of play—based on the visitation,” he explained. “Because that amount of time and focused investment can change that many people’s behavior.”

In Lexington, Kentucky, park planners are working with Trust for Public Land to start translating anonymized cell phone data into a visual form. The data doesn’t reveal anyone’s name, socioeconomic status or ethnicity, but it can show potential travel patterns and which parks people are visiting around the city. Park planners are searching those clues for answers.

“We have populations of people that are living next to parks but they’re driving to another park,” said Michelle Kosieniak, the superintendent of planning and design in Lexington’s parks department. “That begs the question: what are we not providing in the park that they’re near? What are the barriers to using that park?”

Answers vary. It could be safety, and by having visitor heatmaps, park agencies can deploy better lighting or cleanups to where people aren’t going. It could be the lack of attractive amenities, she said, which could prompt public outreach for further additions. Or it could just be that a tiny pocket park doesn’t have what the person is looking for, like spray grounds or pools in the summer. Regardless, it helps a parks agency know where to look, Kosieniak said.

The data’s intent, Kosieniak added, is to build parks that work better for more people. But it also holds value in a routine task that many park agencies are familiar with. “In order to provide the best quality of life for everybody in our community, we need investment,” she explained. “Elected officials that are asked to invest money, or vote on how to invest money, they want to know what they’re going to get, which is fair. That, for us, is what is so valuable about all of this.”

While it may not be for visitation or mobility, San Francisco has one of the most expansive data collection efforts for a parks agency in America. Its parks evaluation program, in effect since 2004 with the passage of Prop C, deploys over 200 evaluators to 234 sites four times a year for a visual check-up. (Some parks, like Golden Gate Park, require a bigger team.) It asks questions about 12 unique features, including amenities and cleanliness. For years, that data has shaped how the agency allocates resources, particularly for ‘Equity Zones,’ which have long standing disinvestment.

“We present the data to park service area managers (PSA), who actually manage the day-to-day maintenance. I’ve had a PSA who had certain lawn areas that were scoring pretty low, in the 60s, and because of that, they were given additional gardeners,” said Benjamin Wan, a senior analyst at SF Recreation and Parks. “A year later, we saw in the data that it increased to 80 or 90 percent.”

Being able to see that information, Wan argued, enables cash-strapped agencies to be smarter with where and how they’re using resources. His unit is always looking to improve the process; his latest project has been data distribution—or, really, democratization—so it’s easier for PSAs to access and dissect it. Other divisions use different data, Wan said; for example, the capital division deploys facility condition indexes for asset management. But everything is shared internally: an exchange, he said, that helps knit together often siloed teams.

“Especially for administrative folks that do park evaluations, it takes us out of our normal, day-to-day work and actually brings us to parks to see the type of maintenance that other divisions are working on. Because often, I’m sitting here in an office and this is all I see,” Wan said, showing his computer screen. “But we’re a department. I think it’s vital for us to see the amazing work that all of our staff do.”

Deciding how and where to invest in parks and open space can yield impacts now and into the future. The 10-Minute Walk® team at Trust for Public Land is working with a number of cities to better understand how data – paired with deep community engagement – can enhance parks usage and guide planning decisions. While many strategies are still in development, these examples provide us with a diverse landscape of ways in which data can prove useful—not just to the park agencies, but to the benefit of nearby communities. With stronger data in hand, more parks agencies are unlocking the many benefits of parks by working to ensure that limited funds are spent more equitably. Overall, more information means better experiences for all.