Recreational Mobility Prior and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

TL;DR

This study analyzes how park visitation patterns in Washington State changed during COVID-19, revealing socioeconomic disparities and validating the gravity model for predicting recreational mobility.

Contribution

It introduces a gravity model-based approach to estimate park visitation trends and highlights socioeconomic differences in recreational behavior during the pandemic.

Findings

High-income residents increased local park visits and explored broader options.

Low-income residents reduced recreational choices during COVID-19.

Gravity model effectively predicts park visitation patterns across regions.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic recession negatively affected many people's physical, social, and psychological health and has been shown to change population-level mobility, but little attention has been given to park visitations as an indicator. Estimating the frequency of park visitations from aggregated mobility data of all the parks in Washington State (USA), we study trends in park use one year prior to and two years during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that the gravity model is a robust model for the park visitation behavior in different spatial resolutions of city level and state level and different socio-economical classes. Incorporating network structure, our detailed analysis highlights that high-income level residents changed their recreational behavior by visiting their local parks more and a broader recreational options outside of their local census area; whereas the low-income residents changed their visitation behavior by reducing their recreational choices.