The dynamic impact of COVID-19 pandemic on park visits: A longitudinal study in the United States

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s park visit pattern has received great attention from both scholars and policy-makers, attributed to parks’ established health benefits and thus serving as an effective strategy to mitigate people’s stress and improve people’s physical and mental health. While burgeoning empirical evidence has been generated, both negative and positive impacts of the pandemic on park visit behaviors have been reported. However, the dynamics of park visits along with the pandemic progress remains underinvestigated. Using locational-based mobile data, this study investigates the longitudinal dynamics of park visits in terms of visiting frequency, travel distance, and time spent within parks across the contiguous United States from January to December 2020. The year-over-year (2019–2020) variations of park visitation patterns are associated with pandemic-relevant variables (i.e., the number of infection cases, and policy stringency index), and the locational characteristics of parks (i.e., “local parks” and “non-local parks” as classified according to ESRI’s US parks dataset). The analytical results reveal that (1) on average, park visit frequency, travel distance, and length of stay reduced since the outbreak of the pandemic; (2) the number of infection cases exerted a negative impact on visit frequency, a positive impact on visitors’ dwelling time, but the inconsistent impact on travel distance in different pandemic periods; (3) the stringency of containment policies negatively affected visit frequency and travel distance, but its impact on park visitors’ dwelling time was inconsistent; and (4) local parks received much fewer visits, even though visitors traveled a longer distance to access some local parks located in peri-urban areas. This study depicts a comprehensive picture of the dynamics of park visitation along with the pandemic progress and sheds light on the ways that parks can aid in recovering from a public health crisis.