Indeed, elements typical of rural environments can – and must – be part of any truly livable urban design, as Olmstead and Vaux‘s plan for Central Park in Manhattan demonstrates, and as further proven by the Olmstead firm‘s five-mile long “Emerald Necklace” around Boston, encompassing 1000 acres of parkland, connecting the Boston Common with the 527-acre Franklin Park.

We know that the better connected parks are, the more a park system can provide healthful recreation—and transportation, too. A recent publication from The Trust for Public Land shows how interconnected trails, greenways‚ and parks support bicycling, running, walking, skating, skiing‚ and even wheelchair travel—reaching all the way from home to work for some users. And several small parks can be connected to create a “large-park experience,” with a tennis court in one park, a basketball court in another, a swimming pool in a third. Connections can be a system of sidewalks or bike lanes, complemented by outstanding signage and perhaps dressed up with a catchy name, such as the Wellness Walk or the Fitness Funway.

The easiest way to create interconnections that also extend a park system is in stream valley parks, particularly where a small stream flows into a larger river and both are flanked with trails. This kind of intersection, comparable to a highway interchange or a train junction, more than doubles the usefulness of a given route. An even more effective connection can be made by bridging a river with a pedestrian crossing, either a new bridge or a repurposed old one. Wherever this has been done—including in Austin, Cincinnati, Chattanooga, Little Rock, Minneapolis, Nashville, Omaha, Pittsburgh, and Tampa—the bridges have become instantly popular attractions.

Another great connector is a rail-trail, a park path constructed out of an abandoned train track. Most of the more than 15,000 miles of U.S. rail-trails are rural, but an increasing number are in cities, including Atlanta; Chicago; Dallas; Houston; Portland, Oregon; Orlando; Seattle; and Washington, D.C.

Platte River Greenway, Denver. Credit: Darcy Kiefel.

Even without a stream or an abandoned railroad, it’s sometimes possible to create a linear corridor. It happened in San Francisco after the public utilities commission decided to retire an underground water main through Visitacion Valley, a lower-income immigrant neighborhood. The corridor had been kept free of weighty construction over the pipe, resulting in a six-block swath of weedy lots through the heart of the community. When the commission tried to sell the land, neighbors objected and worked with The Trust for Public Land to turn it into a park and garden. Today the Visitacion Valley Greenway supports both physical exercise and improved nutrition—and introduces visitors to the exotic Asian medicinal plants growing there.

Another example of a successful city creating connectors is Denver.  In 2009, the American Obesity Association rated Denver residents the least obese of big city Americans. The reason, in part, is their sporty lifestyle. Supporting that way of life is the Platte River Greenway.

It took 30 years to create the Greenway from a former industrial backwater. Today its 15 parks linked by 100 miles of trails attract hundreds of thousands of users. The middle 12 miles—which stretch on either end deep into the suburbs—are operated by the Denver Department of Parks and Recreation, with support from the private Greenway Foundation. Its centerpiece is 22-acre Commons Park, constructed as part of a new walkable neighborhood on a former railyard on the edge of downtown.

Not only does the Greenway lure a continual stream of cyclists, runners, and walkers, the South Platte River itself was reengineered with rocks, riffles, and inflatable dams so that it offers whitewater rapids for kayakers and rafters.

Public investment in the Greenway totaling about $70 million has fueled $2.5 billion in residential, commercial, retail, sports, and entertainment projects along the corridor. Denver, which for several decades was losing population, is now growing again—and recreational opportunities are one reason why.

Randall’s article appeared in the August/September 2011 issue of Planning magazine, available here.

We’ve written before about how the town’s new traffic circle has successfully managed traffic flow at a busy five-way intersection, diverted thousands of gallons of untreated stormwater away from the nearby creek, and become the town center by bringing residents together in an attractive public space.  The more recent news is how the traffic roundabout is spurring local economic development with the construction of a multimodal transportation station adjacent to the circle, courtesy of a U.S. Department of Transportation grant.  Both the transportation hub, which will eventually have high-speed rail service and create an estimated 400-500 new jobs, and the circle take advantage of the town’s existing infrastructure, bus service, and the historic central business district to attract even more residents to the new town center.

The one-third-acre roundabout does much more than move cars. It invites pedestrians with shade trees, benches, lighting, bike parking, green space, and a water feature. People have lunch, read, and play music, and the open space invites community gatherings such as a holiday caroling event. It is the anchor for a community-wide revitalization and is part of Uptown Normal’s LEED-ND Silver recognition.

A popular rails-to-trails conversion, the Constitution Trail, leads to and around the roundabout, helping both to revitalize Normal and to bring people from surrounding areas to Normal’s central district. A new Children’s Discovery Museum on the edge of the roundabout already receives over 140,000 visitors per year, and a hotel and conference enter have recently opened nearby. One indication of the success of the redevelopment is that property values in the district have increased by about 30 percent since 2004.

According to the short video, this traffic circle was almost banned to pedestrians.  It’s a good thing town officials fought back.

Read more about the project here, as well as the other winners from the 2011 National Award for Smart Growth Achievement.

From all of us at City Parks Blog, thanks for reading, commenting and inspiring us this past year with all of your park stories and successes.  We look forward to hearing how park development and redevelopment is changing your city.  Happy New Year and all the best in 2012

Twelve parks – one each month – will be featured on CPA’s website home page in 2012.  Each “Frontline Park” story will show how parks and their stewards are on the forefront of creating healthier, more sustainable cities.  With each month’s feature, CPA will coordinate with each park partner a joint press release for local, national, and social media to announce their selection as a “Frontline Park.”  Featured parks will also be included in CPA’s quarterly e-newsletter Benchmarks distributed to hundreds of CPA members and on the City Parks blog.

We are looking for the best stories.  Is there a non-traditional leader who has helped to bring about change in your local park?  How has park programming helped to address pressing urban issues, such as public health, job creation or community revitalization?  Have you done something really fun and innovative to increase revenue, cultivate volunteers or educate young people?  How did a crisis create an opportunity to build a new partnership?  Stories should be related to one or more of the following topics:

• Community Capacity Building
• Design
• Economic Development
• Education
• Environment
• Funding
• Health
• Maintenance
• Programming
• Public/Private Partnerships
• Safety
• Transportation
• Workforce Development

For more information about application guidelines, please click here: Frontline Park Nominations

Union Station and Columbus Plaza. Credit: Rob Ketcherside (Flickr Feed).

Washington, D.C.’s Union Station is a major destination for tourists and commuters, with about 29 million people visiting it each year.  As a first glimpse of the city for many people traveling by rail or car, Union Station was designed as a grand entryway to the nation’s capital.  It’s classical Beaux-Arts architecture influenced other popular landmarks in Washington, D.C., such as the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials.  But as public transit increases in the city, and the surrounding neighborhoods rapidly undergo redevelopment, it is clear that the 104-year-old-railroad facility needs a facelift.

We recently came across an article in The Washington Post about an 18-month reconstruction project to improve access and safety throughout Columbus Plaza in front of Union Station.  Many years in the making, the $7.8 million redesign will include new sidewalks and upgrades to the traffic signals to enhance the flow of pedestrians and vehicles throughout the plaza.  The plan also calls for eliminating a fishhook-shaped road that cuts through Columbus Plaza, restoring the plaza to its earlier appearance and allowing for easier pedestrian access to the station from the Capitol and other areas.  Additional transit improvements to the area include the very successful bicycle storage and rental facility added to the west side of the station, and laying tracks for the future H Street streetcar route that will terminate at Union Station.

As with any huge endeavor undertaken in Washington, D.C., there are many agencies and interested parties involved in this complex project, including the federal government (who owns Union Station), National Park Service (manages Columbus Plaza), city government (controls the roads), and the Architect of the Capitol (land on the other side of Massachusetts Avenue).  Other partners involved include Amtrak, Greyhound, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, and the Union Station Redevelopment Corporation.  And of course, any structural changes at all to Union Station must also take into account its historical prominence.

Because the “downtrodden appearance” of the plaza when compared to the magnificent train station often confuses the thousands of pedestrians and motorists who use it each day, locals and visitors alike are anxious to see how the reconfiguration will create a more welcoming transportation hub.  As Thomas Luebke, secretary of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, summed up, the idea is to have the space in front of Union Station “be more about a plaza and less about trying to walk across nine lines of vehicle traffic.”

Washington, DC has been blessed with two rivers. The Potomac, though it suffers from pollution issues of its own (the Potomac Conservancy gave the river a D+ rating, in part because of the growing population of genetically mutated fishes),  provides the backdrop to the capitol’s most famous monuments and the springtime explosion of cherry trees. It’s also a hub of recreational activity, lined with parks and trails – one of which, the C&O Canal Trail, follows the river northwards for 184 miles.

The Potomac River looking towards the city center. Photo credit: Flickr user ktylerconk

The banks of the Potomac gained even more greenery with the recent completion of Georgetown Waterfront Park. The 9.5-acre, $24 million project, designed by renowned landscape architecture firm Wallace, Roberts, and Todd, makes the most of its cramped location under an elevated highway with dramatic lighting, a labyrinth, and an interactive fountain. Situated between two rowing centers, Thompson Boat Center and the Potomac Boat Club, it also includes a pergola and river stairs built to accommodate spectators of rowing regattas.

The recently completed Georgetown Waterfront Park. Photo credit: Flickr user NCinDC.

But there’s momentum growing across town, too.

D.C.’s other river, the Anacostia, which forms the southern tip of the city where it flows into the Potomac, has long been an afterthought. Its banks, and the neighborhoods around it, have suffered (a 2008 report by the DC Office of Planning puts median income in the area at 47% below the city’s average, and unemployment continues to far exceed that of the city as a whole).

It is in many ways the opposite of the esteemed Potomac, as captured in this Washington Post description:

“To most Washingtonians, the Anacostia is a very remote presence — that dirty glop of water under the 11th Street Bridge, the Potomac’s ugly cousin, the barrier that sets off the city’s poorer sections from Capitol Hill.”

Once forty feet deep and clear, it is now so choked with sediment and pollution that it is shallow enough to walk across in places.

But if it’s a waterway on life support, the prognosis is good. The Washington Post reports that over the past decade, Congress has appropriated $130 million for Anacostia cleanup. It is also the beneficiary of the District’s 5-cent tax on plastic bags dubbed the “Anacostia River Cleanup Initiative”. The program began in 2010, and has been a major success, dramatically cutting plastic bag litter, and raising $2.5 million for building trash-blocking grates and supporting local cleanup efforts.

Unfortunately, not every attempt to resuscitate the area has been as immediately impactful. Several high-profile efforts to revive the riverfront with parks and mixed-use development emerged just as the recession was beginning, and have since sputtered to a halt. One notable exception, though, is the Capitol Riverfront, a city-created Business Improvement District at the base of the Anacostia that in a few years has become home to over 3,000 residents, 35,000 daytime employees, and seven parks. Two are on the waterfront, including The Yards Park, a new 5.5-acre space with a popular water feature, a pedestrian bridge, and a riverfront boardwalk.

Map of the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail

Extending upwards from the Capitol Riverfront is a 16-mile system of trails on either side of the river in various stages of completion, dubbed the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail. The Anacostia offers something to planners and developers that is increasingly rare, which is space. (The District’s population surged past 600,000 residents in 2010, during a growth spurt not seen since the end of World War II). Compared to the built-up areas along the Potomac (where it took 40 years from planning to construction to carve out less than 10 acres for the Georgetown Waterfront Park) the Anacostia offers a nearly blank slate for big, new ideas.

The Yards Park water feature. Photo credit: Flickr user Mr. T in DC

D.C. is not exactly starved of park acreage – 19% of its land is parks, the second highest among dense cities. The area to the east of the Anacostia is particularly park-dense, but the abundance of overall space masks some deficiencies that a well-connected system of riverfront parks could help address.

Most obvious is the demand for more trails and linear parks. The roads in Rock Creek Park are closed to cars on weekends, bringing huge numbers of walkers, runners, and cyclists into the park. West Potomac Park is bursting at the seams many weeknights, as packs of cyclists and runners wind their way around a 3-mile loop. And more important than the length of the Anacostia Riverwalk is the fact that its trails will link both sides of the river and be connected by a system of bridges (6 are planned or already have pedestrian access) which will allow users to create loops of various lengths.

Further, once completed, the Riverwalk could offer far more than the sum of its parts by leveraging the value of currently disjointed and underused parks along the river. The 446-acre National Arboretum, far from a Metro stop and difficult to reach by bike or foot, could greatly benefit from waterfront pedestrian access. And adding paths to Langston Golf course could better integrate it into the park system, as we discussed in a Landscape Architecture Magazine piece. Just to the south is Congressional Cemetery, through which paths currently run, a great example of integrating public use into a park-like space.

One of the more intriguing possibilities, to mirror the rowing-centric Potomac, is that the Anacostia could offer a place for exploring the city by kayak. Portions of the Potomac are already popular amongst white-water kayakers as well as those who prefer more placid waters, and numerous cities (see Milwaukee, Houston, and Detroit) have established water trail systems that are closely integrated with riverfront parks.

And for the boldest visionaries, there is RFK Stadium, which sits in the middle of the riverfront and is maybe the most conspicuously underused space in the area. A recent article in the Washington Post invited thinkers to discuss the future of the mostly-unused, fifty year-old stadium, and four of the five contributors pondered its potential as a park (often mixed with mixed-use development), offering active amenities like rock climbing or a velodrome to complement the mostly passive recreation areas alongside the riverbanks.

With development starting from scratch in many areas, there is a unique opportunity to create and improve parks in concert with development and transit improvements. The popular Circulator bus routes recently began operating in Anacostia, and the streetcar system that is set to start running through northeast DC along H Street, which is helping to drive the revitalization of the area, may one day cross into Anacostia on the 11^th Street Bridge.

Bike trails along the Anacostia. Photo credit: Flickr user TrailVoice.

Anacostia already has many acres of parkland, but amenity-rich, well-connected riverfront parks are a totally different creature in terms of development potential. There is no shortage of inspiring precedents for an overhaul of the Anacostia and its parks:

• In Minneapolis, a $55 million in investment in parks on the previously industrial riverbanks, along with $150 million in other public improvements, leveraged $1.2 billion in private investment and the creation of thousands of jobs and new residential units.
• Houston is putting its system of Bayou greenways (expected to cost $490 million) at the forefront of its efforts to attract a young, well-educated population, and a recent study led by John Crompton estimated an annual return of $117 million.
• Columbus turned a 160-acre brownfield along the banks of the Scioto River into an urban outdoors destination, featuring a climbing wall, an Audubon center, access for watercraft, and trails that lead to the Scioto Mile in the downtown core. Now the nearby Brewery District is witnessing a revival in residential development.
• Chattanooga, Tennessee was labeled as having the dirtiest air in the country in 1969, and during the 1980’s the city lost 10% of its population. Its dramatic turnaround (it was just celebrated in Outside magazine as the best city to live in, alongside the titans of outdoorsy urban meccas like Portland and Seattle) is in large part attributable to the park-centered $120 million redevelopment of its riverfront and downtown.

With a consortium of 19 agencies comprising the overarching Anacostia Waterfront Initiative, and the slowdown in real estate since the recession, it’s no surprise that development is occurring ploddingly. But as the river itself is cleaned and its channels deepen, there’s a growing sense that so too is the commitment of the city to making the Anacostia a springboard for livable urban development.

The National Mall in Washington, D.C. will soon have bike sharing stations. Credit: Mr. T (Flickr Feed).

Last week, Washington, D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare celebrated its one millionth ride, just in time for its one year anniversary. The nation’s capital is the first community in North America to offer a government-sponsored bike sharing system. Capital Bikeshare is extremely popular, attracting over 18,000 members in the past year. This milestone warranted a party, so the “1st Birthday Bash,” coinciding with Car Free Day, was held in one of D.C.’s newest waterfront parks, Yards Park.

We’ve written before about bringing bike sharing programs to parks, and the success of Capital Bikeshare has led to plans of 60 additional stations in the District as well as Arlington, VA in the next six months. There are even plans to expand northwards and add stations in Rockville and Shady Grove, MD.

But even more exciting than adding stations to the suburbs, The Washington Post reports the National Park Service is allowing Capital Bikeshare to have stations on the National Mall beginning next year. Hopefully this will be the stepping-stone for opening stations in other national parks, including Anacostia Park and Rock Creek Park, increasing usership to them. The National Park Service is also considering adding bike sharing stations to the numerous other circles, squares, and triangle properties they own throughout the District.

For the 10 million annual visitors to the National Mall, these bright red bicycles cannot come soon enough. Currently the closest bike sharing stations can be up to a half-mile away from the most popular tourist and recreational attractions. Eradicating this “bike-share desert in the heart of the District” could only mean increased usership for locals and tourists alike. And because the National Park Service has goals of promoting increased and safer bicycle usage around the Mall, as indicated in the National Mall Plan, adding more bicycle lanes or trails to this area would go in tandem with bike sharing stations.

Placing bike sharing stations in parks will not only bring additional users to city parks, but help increase connectivity to parks and other recreational destinations throughout the city. Encouraging commuters to bicycle through parks as part of their daily route would increase mental as well as physical health. And with the District Department of Transportation giving away 500 helmets to frequent Capital Bikeshare riders, as well as local hotels lending helmets to tourists, safety will come first too.

In 1963 famed Morton Arboretum naturalist May Theilgaard Watts wrote a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune. “We are human beings,” she wrote. “We walk upright on two feet. We need a footpath. Right now there is a chance for Chicago and its suburbs to have a footpath, a long one.” Her visionary and poetic letter led to the creation of the Illinois Prairie Path and marked the beginning of the rails-to-trails movement.

Until the interstate highway program in the 1950s, the world’s best-engineered rights-of-way were railroad corridors. Hills and cliffs were excavated, valleys filled, curves softened, tunnels dug, bridges built, all to provide routes of exquisitely smooth gentleness with little or no cross-traffic. They were also extraordinarily well routed from, to, and through the centers of activity–cities. Today, 130,000 miles of these marvelous linear connections have been abandoned. Already, 1,500 segments totaling 15,000 miles have been turned into trails for biking, skiing, skating, running, and walking. Most are rural but the urban ones almost invariably become the spines of city biking networks that also include on-road bike lanes and other feeder-collector routes. Rail trails have become focal points for nonmotorized transportation and recreation in Seattle; Washington, D.C.; Boston; Indianapolis; Dallas; Cincinnati; Spokane; Milwaukee; St. Petersburg; Albany, New York; Arlington, Virginia; Barrington, Rhode Island; and scores of other cities and towns. And there are still abandoned corridors available for conversion into trails.

The Stone Arch Bridge portion of the St. Anthony Falls Heritage Trail going towards Minneapolis. Credit: Brian Monberg, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

Minneapolis shows the multiple types of rail trails and their power to affect a city’s park, recreation, and transportation systems. Most dramatic is the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi, built by railroad baron James J. Hill for his Great Northern route to Seattle. Opened in 1883, it was in rail service until 1978. Rescued from demolition, the bridge was refurbished for non-motorized use through a variety of federal, state, and local funds and ultimately turned over to the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. Today it is the keystone of the bicycle/pedestrian network in both Minneapolis and St. Paul.

A few blocks away is the Midtown Greenway, created from a former Milwaukee Road track that maintained separation from traffic by being sunk in a box-shaped trench below street level. The 5.5-mile trail today serves several thousand bicyclists, runners, and skaters per day; in the future it will also host an extension of the light-rail system on a parallel track in the same trench. The corridor was bought for $10 million by the Hennepin County Regional Railroad Authority. Trail engineering and construction, which cost $25 million, was paid from a variety of local, regional, state, and federal sources. Annual maintenance, which includes lighting and snow plowing, comes to about $500,000 a year.

A couple of miles north, a different set of tracks has been converted into the Cedar Lake Park and Trail. This isn’t a rail-to-trail, it’s a rail-with-trail. When the Burlington Northern Railroad decided to divest itself of an underutilized freight yard, it kept one track for through service and sold the rest to the Park Board. The Board erected a fence and converted the wide industrial facility into a model nature habitat with three meandering, parallel treadways–two one-way paths for cyclists and skaters, and one soft-surface path for walkers and runners. With an extraordinary amount of community support, volunteerism, and sweat-equity, the 48-acre project cost only $3.5 million to acquire and develop, and it was finished in a record six years.

Six years is a record? Well, yes. Creating a rail trail, candidly, is not easy. The land ownership issues are confusing. Legal and regulatory complexities stretch from the local level to the state capital to Washington, D.C. A review of years-to-complete-a-trail validates the difficulty: for the Capital Crescent Trail in Washington, D.C., eleven years from conception to ribbon-cutting; for the Pinellas Trail in St. Petersburg, fifteen years; for the Minuteman Trail in Arlington, Massachusetts, eighteen years; for the Metropolitan Branch Trail in Washington, D.C., twenty-two years and (as of this writing) counting.

But the final results justify the heartache: These are truly “million-dollar trails.” Other than on a former railroad track, it is simply not possible in an existing built-up community to create a new pathway that is long, straight, wide, continuous, sheathed in vegetation, and almost entirely separated from traffic. And the annual usership numbers reveal the pent-up desire lines: 2 million on the Minuteman Trail outside of Boston; 3 million on the Washington and Old Dominion Trail outside of Washington, D.C.; 1.7 million on the Baltimore and Annapolis Trail; 1.1 million on the East Bay Bicycle Path outside of Providence, Rhode Island; and 1 million on the Capital Crescent Trail in Washington, D.C.

Many park directors initially shy away from taking on the challenge of a rail-trail. This is a serious mistake. In addition to all the connectivity and usership values, rail trails often have ecological and historical values very much in keeping with an urban park system’s mission. With corridor widths of 60 to 100 feet, or even more in the West, they frequently harbor interesting, unusual, and rare plant species on their margins, as well as having bridges, tunnels, and stations. Moreover, trails are so popular that they have radically increased the support base for virtually every park agency that has ever taken one on.

The reality is that creating one of these trails is so tough that it virtually requires a partnership between a park department (or sometimes a public works or transportation department) and the private sector (usually a citizen group, sometimes a foundation or corporation). The financial and legal issues are too much for a group of volunteers to handle alone, while the political issues are too intense for a government agency without citizen support. Some of these conversions are so difficult that a national organization, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, formed specifically to provide technical, legal, financial, and political assistance to communities around the country. The Trust for Public Land is another national organization that has been unusually active with creating urban rail trails.

More than that, trail advocates are fierce in their commitment to these facilities–many see them literally as “do or die” opportunities. In Seattle, when the Post-Intelligencer newspaper reported that the Burlington Northern Railroad had secretly sold off a piece of track that had been slated for a continuation of the Burke-Gilman Trail, cyclists were so outraged that they chained their bikes across the entranceway of Burlington Northern’s Seattle headquarters and began a vehement protest that stayed on the front pages for two months. (The railroad, which had sold the land to an out-of-state tycoon for a place to dock his yacht, found a way to rescind the deal and the corridor is now the trail extension.)

The Capital Crescent Trail as it enters Bethesda, Maryland, 7 miles from its starting point in Washington, D.C. Credit: Barbara Richey, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

In Washington, D.C., when the National Park Service was unable to get a quick congressional appropriation to save the Georgetown Branch from being developed by CSX Railroad into a string of million-dollar homes through a national park, land developer Kingdon Gould III loaned $12 million of his own money and held the land for a year until Congress acted. (The corridor is today the Capital Crescent Trail, centerpiece of what will eventually be a 20-mile “bicycle beltway” within the nation’s capital.)

The latest innovation is the overhead or trestle trail. Influenced by the creation in Paris, France, of the Promenade Plantée (“Planted Walkway”), activists in New York, Chicago, and St. Louis have all discovered abandoned rail trestles and launched campaigns to bring them back as trails. First to open, in 2009, was New York’s High Line, a sensational tour de force in the now-chic former meatpacking district. The walkway (which from day one was so crowded with pedestrians that bicycles were not permitted) includes sophisticated plantings, architectural landscaping reminiscent of railroad tracks, artistic benches and chaise longues, a viewing gallery with picture window overlooking 10th Avenue traffic, a large wall of glass panes dyed every hue of the Hudson River, food carts, seating areas, and more.

A bit less upscale but considerably longer and designed for cyclists as well as walkers, Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail is expected to open in segments as funds for the $45-million conversion are found. The Bloomingdale Trail should serve recreational cyclists as well as purposeful commuters since one day it could join an interconnected trailway linking all the way from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River. St. Louis’s Iron Horse Trestle will also prove helpful to cyclists, runners, and walkers of all stripes since it passes over busy Interstate 70 and leads toward the popular Riverfront Trail along the Mississippi River.

The “Plaza Movil Street Park” was one of three winners of the Philips Livable Cities Award, a global initiative designed to generate innovative, meaningful and achievable ideas to improve the health and wellbeing of city-dwellers across the world. The creator of the Plaza Movil Street Park received a grant of €25,000 to help translate his concept into reality.

Also worth viewing is the video of one of the five finalists, who brings a plan a little closer to home. The “Design Your Own Park Competition” in Binghamton, NY would turn neglected, urban spaces into parks by having neighborhood residents and groups submit designs in a contest, with the winning vision ultimately created and maintained as a public park.

This is a complex question. An individual’s willingness to walk varies greatly depending on age, health, time availability, quality of surroundings, safety, climate, and many other factors. On top of the variability in walking patterns, a city’s density has a bearing on what is considered a reasonable distance and where it is cost effective to add new parks.

The majority of walking studies are for and about commuters. Broadly speaking, they indicate that most people are only willing to walk a quarter-mile as part of a commute. A New York Regional Plan Association study, for example, found that residents within a quarter-mile of a transit facility are 5 to 7 times more likely to walk to the station than other passengers.[1]

Credit: Lynn D. Rosentrater (Flickr Feed).

The quarter-mile standard is also supported by park equity research. Jennifer Wolch, now at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote in 2002 that a quarter-mile is reasonable “for parents taking toddlers and small children to a park for everyday outings and playground opportunities.”  In the context of Los Angeles, she noted, “trips of more than a quarter mile (especially in high-traffic areas or neighborhoods where parents have safety concerns) are unlikely to be acceptable to parents.”[2] 

Conversely, several studies show that a half-mile walk is well within a reasonable distance for most people. The 2002 National Survey of Bicyclist and Pedestrian Attitudes and Behavior, by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, surveyed almost 10,000 people over the age of 16 and found that only 5 percent of walking trips were for getting to work. [3] (This suggests that transit studies should not be too heavily relied upon to determine a reasonable distance to a park.) Of the other trips, 38 percent were for personal errands, 28 percent were for exercise, and 21 percent were for recreation or leisure. The average trip length was 1.3 miles.

A 1976 study of the Bay Area transit system found that only 50 percent of riders who walked to the facility came from within a six-minute walk, but 80 percent came from within ten minutes, or approximately a half-mile.[4] This data supports cities that set a standard of a half-mile (and in some cases, more) as a reasonable distance to walk to a park. Perhaps the crux of the issue is: do people consider walking to the park a chore, or is the walk part of the recreational experience itself?

This isn’t as funny as it sounds. A 1997 study from Austin, Texas stated that “utilitarian and recreational walk activities have been found to have distinct structural characteristics.…Walk distance and duration for commuting, shopping, and reaching transportation are shorter, and recreational walks for exercise, walking the dog, and socializing are longer.”[5] 

Transit-based studies also underscore people’s variability: most won’t walk much more than a quarter-mile to a bus stop, but most will walk up to a half-mile to a commuter rail station. Parks, too, draw pedestrians from “catchment areas” of various sizes, depending on their quality and amenities offered. In a 2002 article, Van Herzele and Weidemann note that “the maximum walking distance may differ according to the function a green space fulfils.”[6]

In summary, research supports the validity of both quarter-mile and half-mile distance goals, depending on perceptions of the built environment, safety, and time constraints. Of course, people’s preferences and habits are only part of the equation for planners, who must also take into account the cost effectiveness of expanding the park system versus improving current parks or focusing on connectivity.

Density is a major factor. Building a new park in a low-density area (5 units per acre) provides access to only about 1,500 people within a quarter-mile range.  In a very dense area (90 units per acre) it serves close to 30,000. So even if planners in, say, Charlotte found a reluctance to walk more than a quarter-mile to a park, the city still probably could not afford to build a park for every 1,500 residents.

The following table illustrates the total population within quarter-mile and half-mile buffers in areas of varying density:

We’re hoping to harness the collective expertise of our readers to keep up to date on current trends in park road closures.

Is your city considering a road closure in a park, either permanently or for certain days of the week or hours of the day? Let us know by posting a comment below.

Thanks for your input!