Modeling spatial accessibility to parks: a national study

Xingyou Zhang,Hua Lu,James B Holt

doi:10.1186/1476-072x-10-31

Xingyou Zhang, Hua Lu + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/1476-072x-10-31

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Abstract

BackgroundParks provide ideal open spaces for leisure-time physical activity and important venues to promote physical activity. The spatial configuration of parks, the number of parks and their spatial distribution across neighborhood areas or local regions, represents the basic park access potential for their residential populations. A new measure of spatial access to parks, population-weighted distance (PWD) to parks, combines the advantages of current park access approaches and incorporates the information processing theory and probability access surface model to more accurately quantify residential population's potential spatial access to parks.ResultsThe PWD was constructed at the basic level of US census geography - blocks - using US park and population data. This new measure of population park accessibility was aggregated to census tract, county, state and national levels. On average, US residential populations are expected to travel 6.7 miles to access their local neighborhood parks. There are significant differences in the PWD to local parks among states. The District of Columbia and Connecticut have the best access to local neighborhood parks with PWD of 0.6 miles and 1.8 miles, respectively. Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming have the largest PWDs of 62.0, 37.4, and 32.8 miles, respectively. Rural states in the western and Midwestern US have lower neighborhood park access, while urban states have relatively higher park access.ConclusionsThe PWD to parks provides a consistent platform for evaluating spatial equity of park access and linking with population health outcomes. It could be an informative evaluation tool for health professionals and policy makers. This new method could be applied to quantify geographic accessibility of other types of services or destinations, such as food, alcohol, and tobacco outlets.

Highlights

Parks provide ideal open spaces for leisure-time physical activity and important venues to promote physical activity
Our preliminary results show that people in the United States (US), on average, are expected to travel 6.7 miles to access their local neighborhood parks
In conclusion, the focus of this paper was to develop a more flexible, accurate and informative modeling framework for quantifying the spatial distributions of parks in relation to population locations that can be used by local policy-makers in developing intervention strategies to increase park access and use and improve population physical activity

Summary

Introduction

Parks provide ideal open spaces for leisure-time physical activity and important venues to promote physical activity. If the prevalence of obesity remains unchanged, per capita spending on health care for adults would rise by 65 percent by 2020 [5]. Both population disease burden and healthcare costs highlight the urgent need to increase population physical activity and healthy eating. Promoting physical activity is a critical public health strategy to contain the current obesity epidemic and to prevent the occurrence of major chronic diseases. Shaping or improving the local built environment to better support healthy behaviors, such as physical activity, has a potential longterm effect on population health and could be a key avenue for successful obesity prevention [7]

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