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Parks managers share an ultimate objective: to ensure that their parks serve their communities
the best way possible. Conducting surveys of park users can help managers respond better to community needs, resolve conflicts among groups of park users, and manage park assets more effectively—all keys to maximizing the community benefits of parks. But while usership surveys are relatively commonplace in other areas of public management, they have not been widely implemented in parks.1 Central Park in New York City is one of a very few parks with a history of regularly surveying users to assess the effectiveness of ongoing improvement efforts.2
The Value of Park Usership Surveys
Recently, as part of the Wallace Foundation's Urban Parks Initiative, the Urban Institute
designed and conducted usership surveys in four urban parks. Our experience illustrates that usership surveying is a potentially valuable tool for parks managers and suggests ways that different types of surveys could be helpful. This brief provides an introduction to user surveys, including examples of their practical and strategic uses and the challenges involved in implementing them successfully.
Surveying park users can help managers perform their jobs. Most parks managers already take advantage of public meetings and formal hearings to obtain input from the community, but collecting information systematically from and about park users can do more. We are not talking here about data purely for research, or to support formal outside evaluation. We are talking about data to help managers take effective action—in designing investment, programming, and outreach strategies, and in monitoring their results.
Data on who uses a park can be compared with data on the wider community surrounding the park, to see whether some groups are being missed. Suppose, for example, that the manager of a neighborhood park has noticed a gradual drop-off in usage. On more and more sunny afternoons, the baseball diamond is vacant, and only one or two mothers are watching their toddlers play in the tot lot. The manager decides to conduct a systematic count of people entering the park over a two-week period, recording gender, ethnicity, and approximate age. Comparing the results to recent census data reveals that the surrounding neighborhood is increasingly composed of single people and childless couples, few of whom are visiting the park's primarily youth-oriented facilities. The usership survey thus provides strong evidence of a misalignment of parks facilities with the changing demographics of the neighboring community.
Data on how people use a park can identify which facilities are being over-, under-, or misused, facilitating decisions about park investment strategies. To illustrate, now that the
manager of our neighborhood park knows that usership is low, he posts observers at various locations around the park to record what visitors are doing. This survey confirms that the baseball diamonds are rarely used, but also that some young people are hanging out and possibly using drugs around the tot lots, making them less welcoming to parents of small children.
Data on why community members do not use a park can guide direct outreach efforts and identify areas and types of services that need to be improved or changed. To gain a better understanding of evolving community needs, our park manager commissions a series of focus groups with neighborhood residents. The focus groups with teens and their parents suggest that an organized after-school recreation program would attract more kids to the park and encourage them to take advantage of its facilities, while discussions with childless residents indicate that they would use the park if it offered a running or walking path and a space where dogs could play.
Finally, data on what park features visitors value can help resolve conflicts among groups. Suppose that over several years, our neighborhood park manager succeeds in substantially expanding usage by organizing a youth sports program, and installing a circumferential running path. Now one vocal group of neighborhood residents is advocating that the tot lots be replaced by a perennial garden, while another is calling for major improvements to the equipment in these tot lots. The manager conducts interviews with a representative sample of park visitors and finds that very few think the tot lots are worth conserving, while many would enjoy a garden area
where they could stroll or sit. He uses these survey results to defend a renovation plan at the next public meeting.
Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).
Notes
1. One reason may be that many parks managers routinely collect and assess visitor counts, and may not yet have recognized the potential value of collecting additional information about and from park users.
2. The Central Park Conservancy and its partner, the New York Department of Parks and Recreation, collected user information beginning in 1972, so that managers would have solid data about how their efforts were working to expand public use. Following an initial survey in 1972, major surveys of park visitors were conducted in 1982, 1989, and 1995.
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