The spatial accessibility of attractive parks in Chicago and a proposed planning support system to evaluate the accessibility of POIs

TL;DR

This study assesses spatial accessibility to attractive urban parks in Chicago for diverse populations using Google Maps data, and proposes a planning support system leveraging POI ratings for improved urban park accessibility evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining crowd-sourced POI ratings with accessibility modeling to evaluate park access for different demographic groups.

Findings

High accessibility scores for parks reachable by walking and driving.

Major highways influence driving accessibility to parks.

Black and high-income populations have higher park accessibility.

Abstract

Urban parks play an essential role in meeting the ecological, social, and recreational requirements of residents. Access to urban parks reflects people's quality of life. The present research focused on the cumulative accessibility by walking and driving to attractive urban parks for different population groups in Chicago. The present study used the ratings and the number of reviews on Google Maps to evaluate each parks' attractiveness. The results present the cumulative accessibility scores using gravity, linear, and kernel models. In addition, the spatial distribution of the accessibility to parks for population groups of different races and levels of income are shown at the 90 m X 90 m land cell scale and at the community level. Highly attractive parks that people walk to receive a high accessibility score. However, parks with high accessibility scores that people drive to were along the major highways. The present study also determined that the Black and high-income populations have a higher accessibility score to parks than other population groups. Moreover, a planning supporting system is proposed that uses rating data that can be gathered from apps such as Google Maps and Yelp to evaluate all types of Points of Interest (POIs) in parks.