Neighborhood Parks Are Barely Reaching Their Audience Potential

Stroll through an average American neighborhood park on a clear spring evening and you’re likely to encounter plenty of kids, mostly boys. You’re extremely unlikely to see adults actually exercising, or seniors of any kind.

That’s not merely anecdotal. These are a few of the findings of a first-of-its-kind, national study of urban park use by the RAND Corporation. In a multi-part survey of 174 neighborhood parks across 25 major U.S. cities, researchers observed that children represented about 38 percent of weekly park use, despite making up just 18 percent of the general population. Boys 12 and under also got far more exercise in parks than other groups did, including girls of the same age. And though seniors represent 20 percent of the general population, they only represented four percent of total park users, and spent a marginal amount of time engaged in exercise.