Visitors line up for food truck fare at the Prospect Park Food Truck Rally.
Credit: Elissa H. Izmailyan

The second season of the Prospect Park Food Truck Rally launched this Sunday in balmy spring weather.  On the third Sunday of each month from April through October, sixteen gourmet food trucks will greet crowds of eager New Yorkers at Grand Army Plaza, a paved area at the Park’s main entrance. Though the Food Truck Rally was initially designed to be a one-time event last May, it has become a monthly fixture in the park in response to its overwhelming success.

Across the nation, food trucks are increasingly popular in city parks.   A new type of vendor is energizing  park patrons, offering new options over and above the typical hot dog/pretzel fare, including everything from locally sourced Vietnamese cuisine (at Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway) to lobster rolls (at the Prospect Park Food Truck Rally).

Concession amenities of all kinds can support parks’ success by attracting attendance and extending the length of stay, creating concentrated hubs of activity.  A high quality and diverse food selection can increase these benefits, and food trucks can provide opportunities to enhance both.  With their inherent portability and commercial-grade kitchen equipment, food trucks can combine the flexibility of temporary concessions with the food quality of more permanent venues.  A rotating core of vendors can expand the variety of  concession offerings in a given location, and while vehicles of any kind can feel aesthetically out-of-place in park environments, food trucks can be positioned in highly trafficked hardscapes adjacent to or within parks.

Many parks have begun to host large, highly publicized food truck events with high levels of visitation. For example, the Food Truck Rodeo in Durham features approximately 30 trucks and live music, drawing activity to support the newly developed Central Park.  In Milwaukee, the downtown BID (EastTown) runs Food Truck Fridays in Cathedral Square, which offers a range of lunchtime options on summer Fridays, to support and sustain a lively downtown atmosphere.

Visitors congregate at the entrance to Prospect Park beside the Food Truck Rally.
Credit: Elissa H. Izmailyan

The Prospect Park Food Rally attracts thousands of visitors each month. According to David Weber, President of New York City Food Truck Association (NYCFTA), the organization that runs the Rally, “While just one food truck is more like a service to support another activity…you get 16 food trucks and it serves as a magnet and becomes a destination.”  Major events can overcome barriers to access and draw park users from a broad region; a NYCFTA event at Governor’s Island, which is accessible only by ferry, drew 17,000 people.

While events of this scale must be properly managed  to mitigate the adverse impacts of visitation, they can also generate a range of benefits to parks, including:

• Attracting visitation:  In addition to drawing high attendance to concession areas, food trucks can increase attendance throughout parks.   Weber describes the Food Truck Rally as a “gateway into the park,” providing a node of activity at the park entrance that welcomes regular and first-time visitors.
• Providing an amenity:  Park patrons enjoy the presence of food trucks and food truck events, as evidenced by their high levels of success. Welcoming food trucks to parks responds to patron preference and may sustain higher levels of park use and enjoyment.
• Generating revenue for parks:   Food trucks typically pay rents to park managers in exchange for the right to vend on-site, which can be dedicated to support park operations.

In every city there are hundreds of acres of streets and roadways potentially available as park and recreational facilities. While parks make up about 20 percent of New York City’s total area, streets make up about 30 percent. In Chicago, 26 percent of the land is devoted to streets compared to only 8 percent for parks. Converting some street capacity for recreational activity–either full-time or part-time–is a underrealized opportunity.

Atlanta closed three miles of roads in Piedmont Park in 1983. The park now attracts more than four million visitors a year. Credit: Piedmont Park Conservancy.

Wresting space away from automobiles is never easy, but if any opportunities constitute “low-hanging fruit” they are the hundreds of miles of roads within city parks. Naturally, all large parks need some streets for access to facilities as well as to allow motorists to get from one side to the other, but most city parks have a surfeit of auto corridors. The National Mall in Washington, D.C., formerly had four parallel drives running for about a mile between the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument. Not only was the green Mall thoroughly intersected every few dozen yards by asphalt, but the drives themselves were permanently clogged with tourists (and government workers) looking for parking spaces. In 1976, just in time for the national bicentennial celebration, Assistant Interior Secretary Nathaniel Reed decided to abolish the two central roads and replace them with pebble-covered walkways reminiscent of those in Paris parks. The aggregate amount of space–about 4 acres–was relatively small, but the impact on park usability, ambience, safety, and air quality was monumental. Similarly, in Atlanta, following a raft of crime and nuisance issues that were negatively affecting Piedmont Park, Parks Commissioner Ted Mastroianni and Mayor Maynard Jackson announced test weekend road closures. Despite protests, the results led to dramatic increases in other uses of the park, such as running, walking, and cycling, and, in 1983 the closures were made total and permanent. (Piedmont Park is today the most car-free major city park in the United States.)

Other examples abound (see below table). San Francisco’s longtime Sunday closure of 2 miles of John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park was extended in 2007 to Saturdays as well. The program, which makes available one of the only hard, flat, safe areas for children in the entire hilly city, according to the San Francisco Bike Coalition, effectively added about 12 acres of parkland without any acquisition or construction costs. Park usage during car-free hours is about double that of when cars are around. Even cities that are thoroughly oriented to cars are finding an enthusiastic constituent response to park road closures. Kansas City, Missouri, bans automobiles on beautiful Cliff Drive within Kessler Park from Friday noon until Monday morning during the summer. San Antonio permanently closed Brackenridge Park’s Wilderness Road and Parfun Way in 2004. And Los Angeles has permanently closed 10 miles of Via del Valle and Mt. Hollywood Drive in Griffith Park to protect wildlife, reduce the risk of fire, and provide a safe, quiet venue for walkers, runners, and cyclists.

It’s not just large parks. Many small parks which were disfigured by roads can be re-greened, too. New York City’s Washington Square, famous as a Greenwich Village movie set and also for street theater, rallies, and as a de facto quad for New York University, had been bisected by Fifth Avenue until 1964. Ironically, a proposal to expand that avenue into a freeway led to the uproar that made the park entirely car-free–and a much more successful space. In Washington, D.C., Thomas Circle had gradually been sliced down in size almost to the diameter of the statue of General George Henry Thomas and his horse, with traffic consuming the entire area. In 2007 the National Park Service and the District of Columbia reinstituted the original circle and rebuilt pedestrian walkways to allow people to use it. Earlier, a similar project re-unified 2.5-acre Logan Circle and helped ignite a renewal of its neighborhood.

In 2007, Houston got itself a park addition by trading away a street. It happened in Hidalgo Park, a venerable 12-acre greenspace in the city’s hard-bitten East End, near the Turning Basin on Buffalo Bayou where Houston started. When a small sliver between the park and the bayou came up for sale, the city secured federal funds to buy it through an obscure federal program called Coastal and Estuarine Land Conservation. The sliver had two drawbacks: It was separated from Hildago Park by a street, plus there is a federal requirement that coastal funds be matched one-to-one by non-federal dollars. Park Director Joe Turner took a tour of the site and had a “Eureka!” moment–why not close the street, have it transferred from the Public Works Department to Parks and Recreation, and use its land value as the local match for the federal grant. The politics and geography happened to be perfect: There were no houses on the street, it had no through access, and the one industrial user at the far end had another plant entrance it could use. And since no one before Joe Turner had ever offered to use the value of a street as a local match, the federal bureaucrats were surprised enough to say yes. (They’ve since rethought it and forbidden the maneuver, but the Houston handshake was grandfathered in.) Today Hidalgo Park is a much-improved 14 acres with unbroken access to the channel and views of the stupendous ships coming up to the Turning Basin.

Closing and beautifying streets that are not in parks is more difficult. Many cities, including Boston, Santa Monica, and New Orleans have turned one of their key downtown streets into a car-free zone, although in nearly all cases the motivation is less for casual, free recreation and clean air than for upscale shopping and dining. Portland, Oregon, however, did pull off a famous and extraordinarily successful “road-to-park” conversion. It involved the 1974 elimination of four-lane Harbor Drive, an expressway along the Willamette River that had been rendered redundant by a new interstate highway. Most cities would have given in to the strenuous remonstrances of their traffic engineers and kept highways along both sides of their river, but under the leadership of Mayor (later Governor) Tom McCall the old roadway was dug up and replaced by 37-acre Waterfront Park. The park opened in 1978, exactly three-quarters of a century after the concept was first proposed by planner and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., in his plan for Portland. Built for about $8.5 million, the park in its very first year was credited with stimulating an estimated $385 million in retail, office, hotel, and residential development in the vicinity. Later named after the visionary governor, Tom McCall Waterfront Park has since become Portland’s focal point for all kinds of activities and festivals.

Baltimore's 14-mile Gwynns Falls Trail used about six miles of underused roads along a scenic stream valley that are now popular with bikers, runners and other non-car users. Credit: Maria Carola.

Some cities, including Baltimore, El Paso, Chicago, New York, and Miami, have recently begun experimenting with the idea of once-a-summer or once-a-month road closures on regular city streets, following the example of the “ciclovias” that have become immensely popular in Bogota, Colombia; Quito, Ecuador; and several other Latin American cities. Called such things as “Summer Streets,” “Scenic Sundays,” “Walk and Roll,” and “Bike Days Miami,” the events often take place on cities’ most park-like streets (Park Avenue in New York, Scenic Drive in El Paso) and bring forth tens of thousands of people in an electrifying, community atmosphere in a domain normally dominated by cars. (The events are often initially organized and promoted by bicyclists but soon become so congested that they evolve into street festivals.)

Cities can permanently convert streets into park-like “Woonerfs,” a Dutch concept for neighborhood ways where pedestrians, bicyclists, and children are given priority over cars. (The name translates to “Home Zone,” which is what it is called in Great Britain.) While the concept has yet to fully establish itself in the United States, variants have surfaced. On downtown Asheville, North Carolina’s, Wall Street, the city installed brick pavers, bollards, benches, and lights so intertwined that they become an obstacle course that greatly reduces automobile speeds. Seattle is doing similar traffic calming in certain neighborhoods and is also adding numerous pervious areas and water-capturing features to add ecological benefits to these “street-parks.”

Forecasts suggest cities will continue to grow over the next several decades, as empty-nesting baby-boomers retire to cities and the Millennials, who are known to prefer urban living, move into their first homes.

All of this is good news for city parks.  As American cities continue to grow, so will the demand for high-quality parkland accessible to urban neighborhoods.  Density creates park demand, and parks attract density.  Perhaps for these reasons, notable downtown residential growth in recent years has occurred in tandem with major investments in urban parks, from Cincinnati to Denver to Houston.

Central Park, New York
Credit: NYC.gov

While there are certain park functions for which density creates challenges, such as habitat preservation, park environments are largely improved by dense and diverse activity and use.  Urban observer and advocate Jane Jacobs was the first to suggest that parks are vacant spaces enlivened by the presence of urban activity.  Over the subsequent decades, the broader community of urbanists has continued to pursue this axiom, as well as its counterpart, that density requires the presence of open space. In his recent book, Walking Home, Ken Greenberg writes:

Greater density paradoxically goes hand in hand with the preservation of nature, giving urban dwellers easier access to the natural world than is the case for their suburban counterparts. Great urban parks like Central Park and Prospect Park in New York, the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, Chapultepec Park in Mexico City, and the Toronto Islands have historically been possible because of the larger populations nearby that have built and maintained them.

In addition to creating demand for parks, density also provides opportunities for parks to sustain themselves financially.  Park advocates and philanthropists, many of whom live or work near their parks, support park-friendly policies and contribute funding and volunteer hours. Dense activity also provides a market for fee-based park programs, from concessions to special events to carousels and skating rinks. These program elements in turn contribute to parks’ success, providing community amenities and reasons to travel to and linger in public space.

Residential density and open space have proved mutually supportive over time. Central Park and the growth of Manhattan are perhaps the best-known example of this trend.  Developed in the 1860s when the population of New York City was almost entirely concentrated downtown, the Central Park was located in public land (acquired through eminent domain) in a 3 by 47 block section of the City’s newly laid out grid.

The park’s designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, suggested that the residential development Central Park would attract would create enormous economic value to the city, creating a rationale for public investment. According to The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011:

Despite the lack of uptown residents, Olmsted anticipated that when the street grid eventually filled out, property near the park would increase in value, and he defended the park’s size on these grounds. When the construction of the grid was complete, Olmsted expected that an ‘artificial wall, twice as high as the Great Wall of China, composed of urban buildings’ would circle the park…

More recently, Santa Fe Railyard Park and Plaza was created in response to demand from the community to preserve the historic railyard site near the downtown core. Between 2000 and 2010, Santa Fe’s population grew by 8%, and this growth increased demand for open spaces for recreation and public gathering.

The Master Planning process for the site, which involved over 6,000 members of the local community, preserved 12 of the site’s 50 acres as a destination downtown park with an immensely popular farmers’ market. The remainder of the site was divided between cultural and community uses, commercial art galleries, office space, retail and restaurant venues, live-work units, and purely residential units. This vibrant mix of uses generates diverse activity and creates a natural constituency to support the new park.

Note: The Greatest Grid exhibit is on view at the Museum of the City of New York through July, 2012.

Creative and technology firms respond to their employees’ preferences by locating in vibrant cities near destination public spaces. This trend can be observed across the country, from the growing tech cluster in Boulder, CO to Google’s recently-opened New York City offices, located one block from the High Line.

Parks have long been regarded as anchors of excellent city neighborhoods. Historic parks like Boston Common are cherished public gathering spaces in established communities, while brand new city parks, like Washington DC’s Yards Park, serve as the hubs around which fledgling communities can grow.

More recently, parks have been regarded as economic assets that create value for their communities, attracting tourism, sustaining real estate values, and increasing public health and enjoyment in ways that can be quantified (as the Center for City Park Excellence does in its Economic Value of a City Park System reports).

In addition to creating near-term economic benefits, parks can generate and sustain long-term economic growth. Over the past several decades, technological change has shifted the national and global economy toward the production of ideas over goods and services. In its Creative Economy Report 2010, the United Nations Council on Trade and Development (UNCTD) reports that growth in the creative economy, including arts, technology, and media has significantly outpaced global economic growth. It states:

In 2008, the eruption of the world financial and economic crisis provoked a drop in global demand and a contraction of 12 per cent in international trade. However, world exports of creative goods and services continued to grow, reaching $592 billion in 2008 — more than double their 2002 level…

In the U.S., the technology sector represent 29% of all growth in the office real estate market in 2011 (as reported by The Wall Street Journal).

In this new economy, a talented workforce – including scientists, programmers, artists, designers, and entrepreneurs – is the most valuable economic resource a city can procure. In a recent report that ranked cities around the world by their economic competitiveness, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) found that human capital is closely correlated with overall economic competitiveness.

The EIU then explains that urban amenities and quality of life are the defining factor in attracting a talented workforce. All other factors equal, talented employees prefer living in cities that are socially, culturally and intellectually vibrant, with diverse and high-quality public amenities that include excellent parks. The UNCTD report affirms these findings:

…comprehensive cultural asset management is a prerequisite for sustained growth in the creative-industries sector and, in a wider perspective, for sustainable economic development and vibrant community life. It is therefore necessary to maintain the principle that cultural assets are intergenerational capital and that their viability may legitimately be sustained by public investment.

The private sector has, as expected, responded swiftly to market forces by relocating to vibrant urban neighborhoods near public spaces. Now, there are promising signs that cities, too, are beginning to view parks as sound, long-term economic investments:

• Synchronous public investments in creative industries and public space. For example, significant public investment in the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, which unites downtown Boston with its waterfront district, was coupled with investments in a new public transit line (the Silver Line) and incentive programs to help technology companies move to the newly branded waterfront “Innovation District.”

• Major investments in new “signature” parks. A recent survey issued by the City Parks Alliance found that 55% of independently managed signature parks, those parks that define their cities, have been built in the past decade.

• Partnership with the private sector. Cities are increasingly partnering with the private sector to access additional resources for parks, from the significant private fundraising that supported Millennium Park’s construction to the corporate sponsorship that provides public programming in Bryant Park.

A sneak peek at the High Line Phase III. This view shows the future 10th Avenue Spur. Credit: Brian Kusler (Flickr Feed)

New York’s High Line has been generating buzz since before its 2009 opening, and the overwhelming success of its first two phases (there were 3,000,000 visitors in 2011) have kept the public anxiously awaiting the last and final phase.  Held up by land ownership issues and fundraising nightmares in a struggling economy, Friends of the High Line scored an amazing win last fall with a record-setting $20 million donation from the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation, the single largest donation ever made to a New York City park.  The generous gift helped build up the park’s endowment and also paid for the design of the last section.

Phase III of the High Line, the last half-mile segment of the abandoned rail line, differs from the first two phases in that it is being constructed simultaneously with Hudson Yards, the 12 million square foot office and residential complex.  The park will be fully built out on the majority of the eastern section of the historic railway, and an interim walkway will be built over the western section.  The park will wrap about the redevelopment and will feature either amphitheater-style seating or an open gathering space with plantings, a spiraling “Guggenheim-esque” staircase providing access to the street level, Play Beams for children, walking paths, and the ever popular “peel-up benches” that are in the first two phases.

The estimated total cost of capital construction on the High Line at the rail yards is $90 million, with $38 million already raised by the conservancy.  A zoning text amendment is already in the works to set a framework and cover approximately 30% of the estimated total cost.  Construction is expected to begin this year and finish by the end of 2013, with a full public opening in spring 2014.

The Bloomingdale Trail and Park. This rendering shows a separate pedestrian zone and bike path.

Unlike the High Line, Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail and Park will be a multi-use trail as well as a destination linear park.  Steadily moving ahead despite fundraising challenges, the design plan for the entire 2.7-mile elevated rail trail was released last week, and included addressing the conflicting needs between speeding cyclists and slow-moving pedestrians.  While the High Line bans dogs, skateboarders, cyclists, and runners, the Bloomingdale Trail and Park will be an arterial connecting four different neighborhoods and providing alternative modes of transportation for commuters.

In addition to its urban views, the Bloomingdale Trail and Park would keep its retaining walls as a linear gallery with colorful murals and gritty graffiti.  There will be eight access points to the trail, spaced roughly a half-mile apart, and five of the entryways will be from ground-level parks.  Instead of modernistic stairways, berms would form gentle upward slopes from two of the parks, another two parks would have entries as ramps, and the last park would be an L-shaped berm at the trail’s western end.  The multi-use path would be 14 feet wide and have gentle curves and dips to serve multiple purposes, including ever-changing views for pedestrians and speed bumps for cyclists.  Trees and shrubs would also serve triple duty by providing shade, habitat for birds, and a separation zone for the pedestrians and bike path.  In fact, Chicagoans are so concerned about this separation (to avoid a repeat of the pedestrian-cyclist disasters that plague the Lakefront Trail), that there is a proposal for 1.5 miles of pedestrian pathways that would run parallel to the multi-use trail.  Of course there still needs to be room for the benches, art, and lighting on the 30-foot-wide trail.

So far more than $37 million has been secured in federal anti-congestion and air-quality funding for the project’s $46 million first phase, with the remaining $7 million to come from the private sector (Exelon Foundation is said to be giving $5 million, their largest single grant, while Boeing and CNA are each donating $1 million) and $2 million from the Chicago Park District.  Construction is expected to begin as early as next year, with the park opening in phases in fall 2014.

The High Line may only be 1.45 miles long, but it offers New York residents and visitors a completely different park perspective, a tranquil escape from the hustle and bustle of urban living.  The Bloomingdale Trail and Park, twice as long as the High Line, will be Chicago’s first elevated park and the longest elevated park anywhere in the world, and will offer its residents and visitors a connection to different neighborhoods and transportation opportunities toward and out of downtown.

For environmental, financial, and legal reasons, urban stormwater management is getting much more attention – and the result is helping to build the urban parks movement. Gone are the days when flood-control engineers would prescribe the construction of straight, deep concrete channels, and one stream after the next would be converted into sterile spillways. (The poster channelized waterway, the Los Angeles River, was used for a spine-tingling truck chase scene in the movie Terminator 2 and was once also proposed–seriously–for use as a highway.) Cities that still have extensive natural wetland areas are now carefully protecting them to contain and filter stormwater; many others are now also creating artificial swales and other storage areas to slow down and capture the sheets of water running off streets and asphalt surfaces.

When it comes to water management and recreation, parks-as-ponds and ponds-as-parks are two sides of the same coin. Although the former doesn’t technically add parkland, it makes existing parks more environmentally productive; the latter can add to a city’s de facto parkland inventory and, of course, adds a second bin of funding opportunities–all the state and federal water protection programs–to the fundraising arsenal. There is no question that the marriage of stormwater retention and parks will become more common in the coming decades, for both ecological and economic reasons.

Staten Island Bluebelt. A man-made extended detention basin after a single growing season. Credit: City of New York.

New York City, in addition to the thousands of acres under Department of Parks and Recreation control, has another 480 acres of so-called Blue Belt land under the jurisdiction of the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). The Blue Belt, located largely but not entirely in Staten Island (the least built-up of the city’s five boroughs), consists of mapped wetlands that DEP acquires for stormwater management. The Blue Belts are zoned as open space and are protected from development, although the protection is not as stringent as for mapped parkland. Parkland can only be de-mapped and “alienated” from the park system through a vote of the state legislature; DEP lands can be sold to a private party if the buyer agrees to protect the official drainage corridors that traverse it–no property owner is allowed to modify a watercourse. Although the Blue Belt lands are partially fenced (to help focus the points of ingress and egress), they are fully open to the public. “Since we’re spending Water Board money and aren’t supposed to be spending it on recreation uses,” said Dana Gumb, director of the Staten Island Bluebelt, “we don’t specifically build any walking trails or other features. But we do have lightly used maintenance access pathways which we’re happy to let people utilize, if they do so appropriately.”

The converse occurs when DEP utilizes official park property for water management and water purification. “We’ll install a storm sewer system under a street to catch rainwater from a neighborhood, and then we’ll daylight it–bring it up to the surface–in a park,” said Gumb. “We’ve done that in Conference House Park, Lemon Creek Park, Wolf’s Pond, Bloomingdale Park, and others.” The department constructs a pond-like water detention and treatment facility that holds the rainwater for about twenty-four hours, absorbs much of the destructive energy of the rushing torrent, allows sediment to settle out, and then permits the cleaned water to seep gradually into Raritan Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. “We’re usually able to locate the holding ponds in areas that had previously been degraded,” Gumb explained. “Places that had been disturbed with fill or were overrun with invasive vines. We use the opportunity to fix them up. When we’re done the community ends up with something beautiful that also cleans the water.”

Although many other municipalities regulate how individuals and commercial entities impact stormwater, almost none currently uses a municipal agency to construct and operate control facilities, and no other city has an agency as sensitive to public recreational use as New York’s DEP. Of course, it’s not always smooth sailing. There are times when DEP’s ecological requirements conflict with the community’s desires and the aesthetics of a park. In neighborhoods with combined sewers that mix household wastewater with street stormwater for joint processing, huge underground holding tanks with pumps and smokestacks are required to cope with the influx from large storms. In the worst of those cases the facility can be a blight on a corner of a park. Even in the best cases with successful restoration, a park may be closed for several years during construction.

“There’ve been instances where DEP has had to pay dearly for the use of parkland,” said Gumb. Perhaps most famous was a multiyear battle over the installation of a mammoth underground drinking water storage tank in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Although the tank was to be completely buried and invisible to park users, the construction project was so large and was slated to take so long that the courts ruled that it was effectively an “alienation” of parkland and would need to be approved by the state legislature. After protracted negotiations, DEP agreed to pay the Parks Department $200 million for the temporary loss of parkland; the money was used to buy and improve dozens of other parks in the Bronx.

As public awareness grows, potentially even more could be done with water detention facilities. In some cases boardwalks, benches and interpretive signage could be added to these natural and manmade marshy areas to put them to double use for walking, running and cycling. Some stormwater storage areas could conceivably also be used as dry-weather playing fields, or skateboard parks if they are fitted with proper warning signage, fencing, and a commitment to hosing down residue following each high-water incident.

High Point Pond in Seattle's Viewpoint Park. Additional amenities in the park include an overlook, trails, benches, a playground, and an artificial boulder-strewn stream. Credit: Seattle Housing Authority.

When the Seattle Housing Authority planned the demolition of the distressed High Point public housing site and its transformation into a new mixed-income community, the authority was required to capture all stormwater to keep it from running off the property. The water was required to be released gradually rather than being funneled destructively into a nearby salmon-bearing stream. But when it considered the aesthetics of the standard, unadorned, chain-link-surrounded holding pit, the authority balked. Instead, it created an extensive 130-acre drainage system culminating in one-and-a-quarter-acre Viewpoint Park with benches, a boulder-filled stream, a pond, a trail, a grass lawn, stairs, a playground, and gardens. “We turned what could’ve been a huge liability into an incredible asset for the community–in a place with a direct view of downtown Seattle,” says Tom Phillips, project manager. Constructed by the Housing Authority, the park has been turned over to the Parks and Recreation Department for management and maintenance.

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.

New York City's no smoking sign. Credit: Susan Sermoneta (Flickr Feed).

In early February, the New York City Council (36-12) approved, and Mayor Bloomberg signed, a ban on smoking in the city’s parks, beaches, pedestrian malls and plazas. Effective as of May 23^rd, the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation can now impose $50 fines on rule breakers. Given what we know about the health value of parks, addressing the issue of smoking bans in parks is salient. What restrictions may a city or municipality place on park users in order to achieve some health or environmental value?

As residents of New York know, administrative code already bans smoking in bars, the subway, retail stores, and several other indoor and outdoor locations. But the most recent amendment, as codified in New York City Administrative Code § 17-503(c)(3), expands the scope of the ban to “any park or other property under the jurisdiction of the department of parks and recreation.” Exceptions to this ban extend to sidewalks immediately adjoining parks and public places, pedestrian routes through any park strip, median or mall adjacent to traffic, parking lots, and theatrical productions.

Two common lines of reasoning characterize the smoking ban debate. Arguments against bans on smoking in public parks often reference the overreach of government into the lives of private citizens, whereby the governmental entity unreasonably infringes upon an individual’s right to undertake a particular behavior. Arguments for bans invoke the government’s role to promote public goods, such as health, and to ensure non-smokers are free of a harmful nuisance. The following overview addresses the legal and policy issues implicating both sides of the argument.

Examples of Outdoor Bans

The New York ordinance is not new; towns and cities across the country have enacted outdoor smoking bans. There are 1,313 states, commonwealths, territories, cities, and counties with a law that restricts smoking in public outdoor places such as parks and beaches.[1] Levels of stringency vary from town to town, but the rationale underlying the bans are generally the same – there are environmental and health issues so important as to justify prohibiting individuals from lighting up in a public outdoor area.

Santa Monica, California no smoking sign. Credit: Flickr Feed.

An ordinance in Bellaire, Texas, a suburb of Houston, forbids smoking within the city’s public parks, in part to prevent children from exposure to smoke.[2] The ban, however, does not prohibit smoking on the public streets or sidewalks.[3] Santa Monica, California, passed an ordinance restricting smoking on its public beaches to address the environmental issue of cigarette butts littering the beaches and water.[4] In fact, the ordinance comprehensively prohibits smoking in a variety of outdoor places: public parks, public beaches, anywhere on city pier except in designated areas, outdoor service areas, or within two feet of any entrance, exit or window of a public building.[5] Both cities may impose fines on violators of the ban.

In 2006, the city of Calabasas, a small community northwest of Los Angeles, enacted one of the toughest anti-smoking ordinances in the nation.[6] It characterized its anti-smoking efforts as an attempt to limit exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS), as opposed to an outright ban on the act of smoking itself. The ordinance prohibits smoking in all public places where an individual may be exposed to secondhand smoke, including parks, sidewalks, outdoor cafés, bus stops, and athletic fields.[7] Fines for violation are imposed up to $500 with a misdemeanor criminal classification.

The New York ordinance allows for some smoking outlets if you are at a public park. Like Bellaire park users, visitors to New York parks are still able to light up on sidewalks bordering the outside of the park.

A Right to Smoke?

A man smoking in a Chicago plaza. Credit: Mary Anne Enriquez (Flickr Feed).

A ban on smoking in a public park raises an interesting question: are there particular rights that ensure that adults may freely undertake a legal act using a legal substance or item in a taxpayer-funded public space that may have a marginal detrimental health impact on other people using that space? Think of drinking a bottle of wine with your special lady friend as you lounge about on a picnic blanket (or grasping onto a flask of whiskey for dear life as you curl up underneath a bench to shield yourself from the brutal chill of a relentless winter wind). What about lighting fireworks? Yelling into an oversized bullhorn to warn of an impending apocalypse? Swinging a metal bat to smash a tightly wound baseball?

A court will invalidate law that, either on its face or in its application, violates a constitutional right. The Constitution does not explicitly reference a right to smoke, so any claim to a right to smoke will fall under the auspices of another constitutional right.[8] Here are just a few examples of avenues that right to smoke advocates have pursued to challenge smoking bans.[9]

Fourteenth Amendment. The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees that a state government will not treat similar groups of people differently without good reason. However, there are classes of people based on race, alienage, national origin and gender that receive greater protection against discriminatory government acts than do other classes – say, women under 5’2” or bald men. Courts review a law that applies to a protected class under a strict or intermediate level of scrutiny. Strict scrutiny requires a state or local law to be necessary to achieve a compelling government interest.

The Supreme Court has rejected the notion that a classification is suspect when the scope of the class is based on voluntary action.[10] Since smoking is a discretionary act, it does not merit greater scrutiny for equal protection purposes. A smoking ban will be constitutionally valid if there is a reasonably conceivable set of facts that provides a rational basis for the classification, such as the promotion of public health.[11]

First Amendment. Conduct alone, such as smoking, is not generally considered speech and thus not afforded First Amendment protections. Smoking bans not targeted at suppressing speech content, and not favoring a particular group, are deemed “content-neutral.”[12] For content-neutral regulations to be valid, they need only be substantially related to an important governmental interest. For example, the federal court in NYC C.L.A.S.H., Inc. v. City of New York upheld the smoking ban in restaurants and bars, finding that smoking in such venues is not a sufficiently expressive conduct to merit First Amendment protection and that the ban was a valid, content-neutral regulation with an important health interest.[13]

In the 2005 case, Roark & Hardee LP v. City of Austin, a federal district court held that an Austin ordinance prohibiting smoking in enclosed public places did not violate bar owners’ First Amendment right to be free from compelled speech.[14] The city “compelled” bar owners to take “necessary steps” to stop patrons from smoking in order to protect the city’s population from the effects of SHS. Since the ordinance regulated conduct and not actual speech, and the owners were free to express views on the ordinance, the city was within its bounds to regulate smoking.

As long as a smoking ban is rationally related to a legitimate government goal, the Constitution will not stand in the way of its passage.[15] Smoking bans have been uniformly upheld against a variety of challenges to their validity.[16] Courts embrace such legislation because of the time-honored acknowledgement that protecting the public’s health is one of the most essential functions of government.[17]

Legislative Rationale

When smoking bans are challenged on constitutional grounds, legislators must justify the ban by demonstrating a legitimate government interest. A frequent argument is that public health concerns justify infringements on smoking.[18] But the effect of public outdoor exposure to SHS is not conclusive. On the one hand, proximity to smoking, even outdoors, may lead to SHS exposure. A recent Stanford University study indicates that tobacco smoke within three feet of a smoker outside is comparable to inside levels. But, as Michael Siegel stated in a New York Times Op-Ed, there is no evidence demonstrating outdoor exposure causes substantial health damage.

Legislators may also cite “annoyance costs” related to smoking, such as cost of cleaning up cigarette butts.[19] Right to clean air advocates often compare smoking to nuisances regulated by the state, such as noisome factories.[20] There is also an argument for treating smoking like sex—as a legal activity relegated to the private sphere.

Public Support

Attitudes towards smoking bans vary depending on locale. Since 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics has conducted a nationwide survey asking participants if and where in outdoor parks smoking should be allowed.[21] The latest results, from a 2008 survey of nearly 1,500 people, showed that roughly 20 percent of respondents thought smoking should be banned outright in parks, 39 percent thought it should be permitted, and 42 thought it should be banned in some areas of parks. This differs slightly from the 2000 survey, in which support for some form of restriction was roughly 60 percent (although, at that time, 40 percent supported an outright ban). The same survey also addressed support of smoking bans in Mississippi. It indicated that over 50 percent of Mississippians do not believe smoking should be banned in parks.

Attitudes do differ. A 2006 survey showed that 70 percent of over 1,500 randomly selected Minnesota respondents favored tobacco-free park policies in parks.[22] Supporting rationale for such policies included reducing litter (71%) and reducing youth opportunities to smoke (65%). Prior to the New York’s outdoor ban, the Coalition for a Smoke-Free City commissioned a 2009 Zogby poll that surveyed 1,002 residents and showed that 65 percent supported a smoking ban in parks and beaches.

Smoking and Public Parks

A woman smokes in a park. Credit: Ripton Scott (Flickr Feed).

Cities and municipalities must weigh the benefits of placing restrictions on potentially harmful behavior to help cultivate healthy outdoor environments against the rights of residents in a public venue. For example, part of the context for the New York park smoking ban was a 2009 New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene study showing that a greater proportion of New York adults, despite lower levels of smoking, are exposed to secondhand smoke than are adults nationally.[23] While there are rights issues involved with smoking bans, such restrictions generally fall within the ambit of legitimate governmental action. And, ideally, enactments to restrict smoking in a park will be borne out of people’s support for the restriction in a publicly funded venue.

The question then is whether the government action achieves its objective. If New York is attempting to improve air quality for park users, pushing smokers to the sidewalks outside parks may not accomplish that goal. It seems that where a park is quite small, such an outlet renders the ban moot because smoke can still get up into park users’ faces. And whether a park is large or small, or one smokes inside or outside the bounds of the park, the impact on the overall ambient air quality of the park would presumably be the same. However, as we learn more about the impact of secondhand smoke on individuals in an outdoor area, it may be the case that the ban, in its current state, is justified.

Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford. Credit: Cedar Hill Cemetery Foundation

From Wyuka Cemetery in Lincoln, Nebraska, where Shakespeare’s plays are performed each summer, to Hartford’s revered Cedar Hill Cemetery, which held a successful series of evening jazz concerts in the summer of 2008, cemeteries may seem like a surprising source of liveliness. But historically, this is not a new idea.

Before there were public parks, cemeteries – most famously Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1831) and Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York (1838) – were the primary manicured and sculpted green space within urban locales. As parks arose, graveyards’ recreational use diminished. But today some cities have hundreds of acres of public and private cemetery grounds which could theoretically help with issues of urban parkland shortage.

The main hurdle is, of course, people’s skepticism about the propriety of jogging, picnicking, or hosting performances in a place of reverence. But Bob Hall, director of Flatwater Shakespeare in Wyuka Cemetery, whose mother and father are buried at Wyuka, feels the performances are “life endorsing.” And to skeptics, he developed a standard response: “I asked my parents, and they didn’t say anything.”

“Cemeteries are for the living,” agrees Mark Smith, sexton of the publicly owned Salt Lake City Cemetery. Rejecting the idea that his facility is only for somber reflection, Smith refers to it as “a hidden gem within the city,” an open space resource that can and should be utilized.

A second obstacle can be family rights, with cemetery authorities owning the ground and individuals owning a burial right that is similar to an easement. In Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery, whose collection of old and unique trees add to the alluring park-like atmosphere, the issue arose when a family asked cemetery authorities to cut down a tree they discovered growing on their ancestral plot. “That was painful,” confesses Kevin Kuharic, director of restoration and landscapes for the Historic Oakland Foundation, “but they were within their rights.”

As a whole, however, public cemeteries of all stripes are discovering ways to welcome the community into these underused spaces. The benefit is double – more people can enjoy the abundant natural and historical treasures within the cemeteries, and the increased visitation helps foundations and park departments preserve these predecessors of the modern public park.

The full text of the article, Cemeteries Alive: Graveyards are Resurging as Green Spaces for the Public, written by Peter Harnik and Aric Merolli, is available here.

For more information about cemeteries, see an earlier post.

Do you park in your park? Does it seem to be a parking lot more than a park, a lot?

Urban park advocates struggle mightily to create new green space through a precious parcel here and an irreplaceable acre there. But a large swath of existing parkland is given over to the prosaic task of automobile storage, complete with its side impacts–impermeable surface, water runoff and erosion, oil drippings, heat island effect, displacement of trees and meadows, and loss of playing area.

A 2007 study by the Center for City Park Excellence of 70 major city parks in the United States revealed that, collectively, they devote a total of 529 acres to the very technology that many people seek to escape when they head into their local patch of nature. That’s an area larger than Schenley Park in Pittsburgh, City Park in Denver, Lake Harriet Park in Minneapolis, or Franklin Park in Boston. In Chicago, where the city spent $475 million to create 24-acre Millennium Park, almost twice that much land–46 acres–is given over to auto storage within nearby Lincoln Park.

Hard to find parking spaces in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Credit: Google Earth.

On average, CCPE found that signature urban parks provide slightly more than one auto space for every acre of parkland. The range is from almost zero spaces in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to more than 6,000 in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, more than 7,000 in St. Louis’s Forest Park, and 10,000 in Flushing Meadow/Corona Park in New York.

Storing an unused car requires approximately 330 square feet (.008 acres), according to Donald Shoup, professor of Urban Planning at University of California at Los Angeles and author of The High Cost of Free Parking. This factors in the actual surface area of the auto plus the extra space for aisles required to maneuver in and out of an enclosure. For a 500-car lot, that comes to four acres. Of course, Americans assume they have the right to drive, one person per car, from home to a space directly next to a tennis court, rose garden, or picnic table–at least until it’s pointed out that 100 percent auto access means 0 percent park.

Despite the popular assumption, auto storage doesn’t correlate directly with visitation. The nation’s most heavily used park, Central Park in New York, has only 130 parking spaces yet gets 25 million visits per year. Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, receives 6 million visits while providing only forty spaces for skaters at Wollman Rink–and that lot is open only periodically. On the other hand, in Houston, about 15 of Hermann Park’s 445 acres are devoted to 2,000 spaces for automobile storage. Interestingly, although it gets about 2.3 million visits per year, Hermann is less heavily used than Riverside Park in New York, which has almost no auto storage.

“On about fifty days per year there is no possible way to meet the demand, and on another fifty we’re right at the limit for capacity,” says Rick Dewees, administrator of Hermann Park. Nevertheless, he points out, “It’s hard to add spaces when the lots are empty three-fourths of the time.” Dewees has been forced to become a bit thick-skinned about the issue: “You’re always going to have people complaining there isn’t enough parking during peak times,” he says.

Parks surrounded by low-density housing with little or no mass transportation and filled with high-intensity sports facilities are under relentless pressure to provide large amounts of space for cars. But not every park is held hostage by the automobile. Parks with many people living or working in close proximity and a range of good transit options nearby are able to succeed with little or no car storage.

Of the nation’s big-city signature parks, Atlanta’s Piedmont Park is relatively small, making an internal auto repository particularly undesirable. Not only is there no open-air lot, there aren’t even curbside spaces, since the city closed all Piedmont’s internal roadways to cars in 1983. The park is fairly well-served by transit, but overflow autos end up in the surrounding neighborhood. Also in Piedmont Park is the Atlanta Botanical Garden which has the same automobile problem. The Garden’s original proposal to construct a multilevel garage in an underused portion of the park generated shock and opposition, but gradually a broad compromise was crafted, and in 2008 an 800-car garage was built relatively inconspicuously in a steep, wooded hillside. In return, the Piedmont Park Conservancy removed the existing open-air lot and also added more park entrances for walkers and cyclists. Serving both Botanical Garden visitors and Piedmont Park users (with the Garden covering the costs of construction and operation), the garage charges $1.75 per hour.

There are three ways to reduce the problem of car storage in city parks. By far the simplest and most effective is to charge a parking fee. Storing a car in a park is a service with value. Doing so also places many human and environmental costs on the park system. With an equation like that, a payment should work.

Most of the high-population-density cities rely on residents to walk, use transit or bikes, or pay to use private garages nearby. Most of the low-density cities don’t necessarily get enough usership in any one park for it to be an overwhelming problem. It is in the mid-density cities that the issue often comes to a head. Minneapolis has taken the lead in charging for cars. After a failed 10-year experiment with an honor system in the busiest of its six regional parks, the Park Board installed meters, charging between 50 cents and $1.25 per hour, depending upon demand. Because the Park Board receives all the meter revenue, it can determine how the money ($795,000 in 2005) is used, with some of the funds going to park maintenance and some to youth athletics.

Aerial shot of Hermann Park looking south with light-rail in the foreground. Credit: David J. Schmoll.

The flip side of the coin, of course, is to provide park users with transit options. Eight of the ten most heavily used city parks have subway or light-rail access within one-quarter mile, and all of them have bus service that comes even closer. Outside of New York City (where almost all parks have subway service), among the parks best-served by rail are Boston Common, Forest Park in St. Louis, Grant Park in Chicago, Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, and the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Naturally, instituting transit service, especially rail, to major parks is expensive. But it is not out of the question. In Houston, the city’s first light-rail line, opened in January 2004, features two stops in Hermann Park.

At Washington Park in Portland, Oregon, home to the popular Rose and Japanese Gardens, cars and buses regularly exceed the auto storage capacity from May through September. The city is unwilling to add to the 86 spaces (though it is unwilling to charge for them, either). In response to the crunch, Tri-Met, the regional transit agency, has added a peak-season bus that shuttles between eight stops within the 130-acre park and the closest MAX light-rail stop. The service, which runs every 15 minutes and costs $1.70 (or is free with a transfer) is aggressively advertised by the park department, Tri-Met and by event promoters. The route gets about 500 riders per day on weekends and 420 on weekdays.

Which leads to the third way of reducing auto storage problems in parks: increasing population density nearby. For every person who lives within walking distance of a park, one fewer needs to drive and deal with a car when he or she gets there. Comparison in point: New York’s Riverside Park and Fresno’s Woodward Park. Both are approximately the same size (325 and 300 acres, respectively) but Riverside has only 120 parking spaces while Woodward has 2,500. The difference is in the surrounding neighborhoods. Riverside has the Hudson River on one side and a solid row of twelve- and sixteen-story buildings on the other. Woodward is bordered by single-family homes, most of which have lots large enough for pools, on cul-de-sac street layouts. The residential population density around Woodward is about 6.5 persons per acre, virtually guaranteeing heavy reliance on autos to get to the park. The density around Riverside Park is about 150 persons per acre, and most users of the park walk from within about four blocks.

Obviously, adding residential (or commercial) density around parks is not a short-term project. Nor is it noncontroversial. People who live in single-family homes on large lots around parks enjoy their quality of life and understandably want to maintain it. However, a case can be made that increasing density unlocks a great deal of value for the benefit of the whole city, including more property tax revenue, the likelihood of healthier citizens because of park views and use, and the ability to reduce the presence of stored automobiles in parks.