The rating system, ParkScore, is based on more than a year's worth of data from cities and parks departments around the country. The scores are a composite of five factors: median park size, acreage as a percent of city area, percent of residents living within a 10-minute walk of a park, park system spending per resident, and the number of playgrounds per 10,000 residents.
"Even if you have a big city or a small city, a dense city or a more spread out city, an older city or a younger city, we feel that those factors all point to a pretty fair way of judging cities against each other," says Peter Harnik, director of the Trust for Public Land's Center for City Park Excellence. He says advanced GIS data enabled a more detailed analysis of spatial information, including pedestrian barriers like train tracks or paths uncrossable without a bridge.
In addition to the rankings, the Trust for Public Land has created a website where the complete data from all the rankings can be seen. Users can also see block-level maps showing the most park-accessible areas in these cities.
No one city performed ideally across all these metrics. Top ranking San Francisco, for example, has a median park size of just 2 acres, while 8th-ranked San Diego has a median size of 6.7 acres. And while Virginia Beach has the highest number of parks per 10,000 residents in this list – 5 – the city ranks 7th.
Harnik notes that a wide variety of factors determine how well a city's parks serve its people. The number of playgrounds may be the most important.
"We feel a playground is really a basic bottom-line measure of what a city park system is doing for its residents. Obviously playgrounds are great for children, but they go way beyond children. They're community gathering areas, they are so important to the social network of a neighborhood and a city," Harnik says. "It's somewhat of a predictor of the other kinds of facilities that a city parks department provides its citizens."
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