People are unlikely to visit their neighborhood park often unless they perceive the park to be easy and safe to get to on foot, according to a study published online recently in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning.

In fact, it’s walkability rather than distance from a park that determines whether residents will use it — or other types of green space — frequently, the study suggests.

“This was surprising because oftentimes we assume that people living close to a park are more likely to visit the park and benefit from this use,” said Adriana Zuniga-Teran, the study’s lead author and an assistant research scientist at the University of Arizona’s College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, in a released statement.

The study’s findings underscore the importance of considering walkability when creating green spaces in existing or new neighborhoods.

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Access to green space — defined in this study as “any vegetated space from parks, sport fields, golf course, school fields, or gardens” — has been found in many previous studies to have the potential to promote physical activity and improve health and wellbeing.

Zuniga-Teran and her colleagues wanted to explore the role that perceptions of neighborhood walkability play in the frequency of green space use. They also wanted to see if those perceptions were different for neighborhood residents who regularly use such spaces versus those who don’t.

In-depth interviews

For the study, the researchers surveyed 103 users of the Rillito River Park in Tucson, Arizona, as well as an additional 309 residents of two adjacent neighborhoods, including a high-density one. The park was selected “because it has many amenities and infrastructure including bicycle paths, dirt trails, parking, restroom facilities, and drinking fountains,” the researchers explain. It is also a linear park that connects with other green spaces in the region.

Due to these features, Rillito River Park “offers insights that can be applicable elsewhere in the city [of Tucson] and in comparable cities,” the researchers write.

The surveys revealed that people who said their primary way of getting to the park was on foot were 3,500 times more likely to use the green space daily than those who said they drove to the park. Proximity to the park, however, was not associated with how often people visited it.

“In other words, the respondents did not indicate that their frequency of greenspace visitation was related to how close they lived to greenspace,” the researchers write.

Safety and sense of community

The major factor in whether people perceived that the park was easy to walk to had to do with traffic safety.

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“Let’s say you live in front of a huge park, but there’s this huge freeway in the middle,” Zuniga-Teran explains. “You’re very close, but just crossing the major street, you might need to take the car and spend a long time in that intersection.”

In that situation, people probably wouldn’t visit the park frequently, despite living near it, she says.

But busy roads weren’t the only barriers. The way some neighborhoods are designed — with many cul-de-sacs or dead-end roads, for example — can also keep residents living near a park from easily accessing it on foot, the study found.

“We might think we are designing walkable neighborhoods, but people might not feel like that,” says Zuniga-Teran.

The study also identified two additional factors that influence people’s use of neighborhood green spaces: their sense of community (“how many opportunities for social interaction exist within a neighborhood”) and their perception of surveillance (“how well residents inside buildings can see outside into the neighborhood”).

“When residents perceived high levels of community in their neighborhoods, they were more likely to visit greenspace weekly, and less likely to visit greenspace only monthly or yearly,” the study reports.

Residents were also more likely to visit the nearby park, the study found, if homes in their immediate neighborhood had front porches and were set close to the the street and if larger residential buildings had front doors and windows that face the street.

Limitations and implications

The study was small and involved people living near a single park in a single American city, so it’s unclear how applicable the findings may be to other communities.

Still, the findings are in line with other research that has identified walkability as a factor that influences people’s use of parks and other green spaces.

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“By directing efforts to increase not only the availability of greenspace throughout cities but also the level of walkability in surrounding neighborhoods — particularly traffic safety, surveillance, and community — urban planners are likely to contribute to healthier communities,” Zuniga-Teran and her co-authors conclude.

FMI: The study can be read in full at Landscape and Urban Planning’s website.