Louisville near bottom of park rankings

Today we found out Louisville has older commuters who drive to work alone. Now we're discovering that we continue to rank poorly in an annual study that critiques park systems in the largest cities.

One big reason is that most of us have to drive to get to our parks.

Oh, and yesterday we learned that Louisville ranks fifth worst for fitness among 50 largest U.S. metro areas.

It's all related, don't you think?

Anyway, Louisville earned 1.5 out of five "park benches" on The Trust for Public Land's ParkScore index, ranking 72nd among the 75 largest cities in the United States. Louisville received high marks for its large median park size, but did not score well on park access.

"Our goal is for every American to live within a 10-minute walk of a park, and ParkScore is a good snapshot of how America's largest cities are doing in meeting that goal," said Will Rogers, president of The Trust for Public Land, in a news release.

Louisville's park system has long been a sense of pride, and these report rankings in the past have rankled local park officials. To be fair, the rating would no doubt be different it it were based solely on the city before city-county merger. The largest swaths of areas without walkable access to parks are in Jefferson County's surburban areas.

But it seems like a good thing for a city to be challenged to do better. And as the success of the Parklands of Floyds Fork shows, its location in eastern Jefferson County has been a huge draw.

Louisville received high marks for its large median park size. At nearly 8 acres, the median Louisville park is well above the national ParkScore average of 5 acres, according to the Trust for Public Land.

However, with only 33 percent of residents living within a 10-minute walk of park, the city scored far below the average of 71 percent. Louisville's overall score was also hurt by low marks for park facilities, including playgrounds and recreation and senior centers.

On last year's index, Louisville ranked 58th of 60 cities evaluated. The city's ranking decline for 2015 was caused by the debut of higher-ranking cities on the 2015 list, and not by changes to the local park system.

For more information, check out an interactive map, along with the full report, on the Trust's website.

Regarding that fitness study: It was based on an area that included Jefferson County and eight surrounding counties in Kentucky and four in southern Indiana. The good news there: We were second worst last year, so we're moving up.