Abstract
Due to a growing appreciation for the ecological and recreational benefits of public green spaces, the evaluation of urban parks’ service efficiency, as well as citizens’ behavioral preferences for daily recreation, have become an increasing academic focus. However, due to the lack of empirical approaches, existing research on exploring park service areas has been simplified by their use of Euclidean distance or buffer sets by simulation, ignoring the fact that the likelihood of citizens visiting urban parks is time sensitive. Utilizing mobile signaling data and web map services, this study proposes an approach to estimating the travel times of park visitors and analyzing the characteristics of park service areas from the perspective of actual time consumption. Taking Shanghai as a case study, this research firstly identified the time–cost decay of parks with different areas and locations. A comparison analysis was then used to examine the spatial relationship between park service areas and their accessibility defined by time consumption. The results show that (1) urban parks in Shanghai have larger mean service radii than existing planning guidelines, and park service areas were significantly influenced by park locations; (2) people have a great preference for urban parks whose travel times by public transit are under 40 min, and they have no desire to visit parks located within or outside the Middle Ring Road when the travel times reach 60 min and 75 min, respectively; (3) the shapes of park service areas are consistent with the high-accessibility districts defined by time thresholds, in spite of some differences caused by citizens’ choices. These findings provide an effective tool for evaluating the actual characteristics of park recreational services, along with direct implications for policymakers aiming to establish effective strategies for improving the accessibility and vitality of urban parks.
Highlights
The urban park system is one of the most important components of the urban public service system, providing both physical and psychological health benefits for residents while positively impacting the social, economic, and ecological development of urban areas [1,2,3,4]
In line with research in China [13,19], this study found that urban parks in Shanghai have a much larger service radii than those prescribed in existing planning guidelines for green spaces
By combining mobile phone signaling data with web map services, this study identified park users and their residences and estimated their travel times in order to investigate their behavior patterns when visiting urban parks
Summary
The urban park system is one of the most important components of the urban public service system, providing both physical and psychological health benefits for residents while positively impacting the social, economic, and ecological development of urban areas [1,2,3,4]. In the past few decades, rapid urbanization has transformed how people live in developing countries, minimizing urban dwellers’ access to natural recreational activities because of a lack of green space and high urban population density [7,8] To resolve such problems, it is important for policymakers and urban planners to determine how efficiently urban parks are used and to provide residents with sufficient public green spaces [6,9]. Because of the limited availability of traffic network data, some scholars have simplified park service areas as radii based on Euclidean distance [14,17,18,19] or delineated it by Thiessen polygons [20] Both methods, fail to take into account actual access routes, ignoring the spatial differences caused by various factors, such as road networks and urban morphology. Given the difference between actual recreation behavior and idealized accessibility measurement methods, it is necessary to answer the question as to where the boundaries of the potential influence of a park recreation service can be established when considering the actual traffic situation and visitors’ travel preferences
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