There is probably a park within a mile of you. There is a decent chance you have not been inside it this month.
That gap is not a personal failing, and it is not a mystery either. It is one of the better-documented findings in the research on parks and physical activity, and it has an unglamorous explanation. A park is a piece of public infrastructure with an operating budget, a staffing plan and a maintenance schedule. Whether anyone uses it depends far more on what that budget pays for than on how many feet separate it from your front door.
Most writing about parks skips straight to the health argument. This article skips the health argument, because article 728 owns the green-space research and article 732 owns the psychology. What follows is the operations side: what makes a park get used, who pays for it, what gets cut when money is short, and the four or five places where a resident can apply pressure.
Distance is a weaker predictor than almost anyone expects
The cleanest test of this came out of a 2008 study in the American Journal of Public Health by Kaczynski, Potwarka and Saelens. The researchers audited 33 parks for 28 specific features, then had 380 adults living nearby keep seven-day activity logs recording where they exercised. They then asked which variables predicted whether a given park was used for physical activity, controlling for how safe and attractive residents thought their neighborhood was.
Number of features predicted use. Park size did not. Distance from home did not.
The study also drew a distinction worth borrowing. It separated facilities, meaning things you do something with, from amenities, meaning things that make being there more comfortable. Facilities mattered more, and trails had the strongest relationship with park use of anything measured.
A 2011 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine by Floyd and colleagues found something structurally similar in Durham, North Carolina. Observers recorded 2,712 children and adolescents across 20 randomly selected parks. About a third were walking and roughly one in eight was in vigorous activity. The features of the parks themselves were associated with how active children were. The characteristics of the surrounding neighborhoods were not.
Put those together and the common assumption inverts. Siting a park near people is a prerequisite, not a cause. What people respond to is what is inside the fence.
Programming is the finding that keeps reappearing
The sturdiest study in this field is also the only national one. In 2016, Cohen and colleagues published the first nationally representative assessment of American neighborhood parks in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, with co-authors from the RAND Corporation, City Parks Alliance, the Trust for Public Land and two universities. Using stratified multistage sampling, they drew 174 neighborhood parks across 25 cities with populations above 100,000 and sent trained observers to watch them through a typical week in the spring and summer of 2014. Park administrators were interviewed separately about policies and practices.
The averages give you a baseline nobody had before. The typical neighborhood park ran 8.8 acres and drew about 20 users an hour, which works out to roughly 1,533 person-hours of use in a week. Walking loops and gymnasia each generated about 221 hours per week of moderate to vigorous activity, more than any other feature.
Two findings from that study reorder the usual priorities.
First, seniors were 4 percent of observed park users and 20 percent of the general population. Whatever these parks were built for, it was mostly not the people with the most free time.
Second, and this is the one to carry: parks in low-income neighborhoods were used less than parks in high-income neighborhoods, and the study attributed that difference largely to fewer supervised activities and less marketing and outreach, rather than to the physical plant. Offering programming was associated with 37 percent more weekly hours of moderate to vigorous activity in a park. Marketing, meaning things as basic as banners and posters announcing that something is happening, was associated with 63 percent more.
That finding is awkward for the way parks usually get discussed. Ribbon-cuttings are for capital projects. Nobody holds a press conference about a summer program schedule or a sign on a fence, and those are what the national data associate with use.
Renovation alone does not reliably work
The honest counterweight is that rebuilding a park does not guarantee anybody shows up.
A 2013 quasi-experimental study in the Journal of Environmental and Public Health followed a playground renovation in New South Wales against a comparison park, observing use and activity before and after and interviewing visitors. At follow-up there was no detectable difference in use between the two parks and no detectable difference in the number of children in moderate to vigorous activity. Attendance rose among boys and fell among girls at the renovated park. Most tellingly, how much a playground was used correlated with what parents and carers thought of its features, and did not correlate with how physically active the children there were.
A park can be popular and sedentary. Those are two different outcomes, and public debate routinely treats them as one.
The federal Community Preventive Services Task Force reached a careful version of the same conclusion. In a finding issued in December 2016, drawn from a systematic review of 90 studies searched through June 2014, of which 52 were conducted in the United States, the task force recommends built-environment approaches that combine transportation interventions for walking and cycling with land-use and design interventions, including creating or improving access to parks. The recommendation is for the combination. A park on its own is not what the task force endorsed.
Shade is a measurable feature, not a nicety
Shade belongs in the quality conversation with a number attached to it, because in much of the country it determines whether a park is usable for several months a year.
Researchers with the Green Schoolyards Project, publishing their methods and baseline findings in BMC Public Health in 2021, installed ten temperature and humidity sensors in each of three joint-use school parks in Central Texas and measured heat index across the grounds. In September 2019, the maximum daily heat index ranged from 103.4 degrees Fahrenheit under tree canopy to 114.1 degrees on an unshaded playground. Those readings came from the same parks on the same days. The researchers also observed more children positioning themselves under trees during the high-heat period than in the milder November week.
Nearly 11 degrees of heat index between two spots a short walk apart is a design decision with health consequences, and it was made, or not made, by whoever chose where to plant trees twenty years earlier. Article 722 owns heat and article 733 owns sun exposure.
Seating, restrooms and lighting are harder to defend with the same confidence, and an honest article has to say so. Kaczynski’s finding that facilities outperform amenities cuts against the assumption that benches and bathrooms drive use. The CDC’s community-design guidance, last reviewed in May 2026, treats lighting and well-maintained sidewalks as features of the route to a park rather than of the park itself, which is probably where they do the most work. The evidence for programming is strong. The evidence for comfort amenities is thinner, and a resident arguing for them should know which argument they are making.
Who owns a park, who pays for it, and what gets cut first
Nearly all of the parks Americans use are local. Cities, counties, townships and special park districts own them, staff them and maintain them, and the money comes mostly from local general revenue, which means property and sales taxes competing against police, fire, schools and roads in the same budget cycle.
For scale, the National Recreation and Park Association’s 2026 Agency Performance Review reports that a typical park agency runs one park for every 2,437 residents it serves and holds about 10 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents. Per-resident spending varies enormously between cities. The Trust for Public Land’s 2026 ParkScore report, which ranks the 100 most populous US cities on access, acreage, investment, amenities and equity, put Washington, DC first and recorded $449 per resident in annual park spending there, with 693 parks and 21.5 percent of city land in parks. Most cities are nowhere near that figure.
Federal money exists but is a minority share and mostly builds rather than operates. The Land and Water Conservation Fund, created in 1964 and funded from offshore oil and gas leasing revenue rather than taxes, makes matching grants to state and local governments through its state side, and the National Park Service reports it has helped fund more than 46,000 projects since 1965. Congress permanently reauthorized it in the Dingell Act in March 2019 and permanently funded it in the Great American Outdoors Act in August 2020.
That funding carries an unusual string, and it is the most interesting piece of park law on the books. Under 36 CFR Part 59, a site assisted with those funds must be, in the regulation’s words, “continually maintained in public recreation use unless NPS approves substitution property …” Converting it to anything else requires federal approval, an evaluation of all practical alternatives, and replacement land of at least equal appraised fair market value and reasonably equivalent usefulness and location. A neighborhood park bought with a 1970s federal grant is, in effect, locked in as a park. Developers find this out the hard way.
Now the structural problem. Capital spending and operating spending come from different places and behave differently. A grant, a bond or a philanthropic gift builds a splash pad. None of them pays the person who cleans it, and a budget line for maintenance is politically invisible: cutting it produces no closure announcement, no headline and no immediate complaint. It produces a slow decline that shows up three years later as a locked restroom and a broken swing.
The federal park system illustrates where that ends, and it is the best-documented example available because the numbers are published. The National Park Service put its deferred maintenance and repair backlog at roughly $24.2 billion at the end of fiscal year 2025, spread across 70,687 locations. The Great American Outdoors Act’s Legacy Restoration Fund provided up to $1.3 billion a year for five years through 2025 to work it down. That is the best-funded, most visible park system in the country, and it still accumulated a backlog in the tens of billions. A city parks department with a tenth of the attention is not doing better.
The 10-minute-walk goal, and what it does and does not measure
The most widely repeated access target in American parks is the 10-minute walk, which the campaign page describes as the aim of putting “a park or natural area within a 10-minute walk of everyone.” The Trust for Public Land, a national conservation nonprofit, leads that campaign and defines the distance as half a mile. Its page states that in many cities more than half of children lack a park or green space within that distance, though it gives no methodology for the figure and the organization is an advocate for the goal it is measuring.
Treat the target as what it is: a planning benchmark for siting, not a prediction about behavior. The research above says proximity is close to necessary and nowhere near sufficient. A city can hit a 10-minute-walk target and still own a hundred parks nobody programs. Both things can be true, and the access target is easier to measure, which is partly why it dominates.
Safety is a real barrier and a confusing variable
Safety concerns keep people out of parks. That is well established from how residents describe their own decisions, and it should not be reframed as a misperception to be corrected with a brochure.
What the measurement literature shows is stranger than that. In a 2009 study in Preventive Medicine, Cohen and colleagues surveyed 51 park directors and 4,257 park users and local residents, and observed 30 parks across a diverse Southern California metropolitan area between 2006 and 2008. The strongest correlates of how many people were in a park were its size and the number of organized activities happening. Neighborhood population density, neighborhood poverty, residents’ perceptions of park safety and the existence of a park advisory board were not associated with park use.
The authors drew the right lesson from that, and it is a useful distinction: feeling unsafe keeps people away, but feeling safe does not by itself bring them in. Safety is closer to a gate than an engine. Removing a barrier returns the decision to the person, and then something has to be worth coming for.
The practical read for a resident is to stop treating safety and programming as competing asks. A staffed, programmed, occupied park is the intervention that addresses both, because the most reliable thing that makes a public space feel safe is other people using it for something.
Where a resident can push
Four levers are real, and all of them are more accessible than most people assume.
Your park board or commission. Many park systems are governed or advised by an appointed board that meets publicly on a schedule. Those meetings are where programming budgets, fee schedules and facility priorities are discussed before they are decided. The research says these boards are not associated with higher park use, which tells you they are not self-executing. It does not tell you the seats are worthless.
Budget comment periods, which are often federally mandated. If your city receives federal community development money, it must adopt a consolidated plan, and under 24 CFR 91.105 that process carries specific obligations: at least two public hearings a year at different stages of the program year, at least one of them before the proposed plan is published for comment, no less than 30 calendar days for residents to comment, and reasonable and timely access to program records covering the preceding five years. HUD considers two weeks adequate notice for a hearing. That same body of regulation lists repairing parks and playgrounds among eligible interim-assistance activities in deteriorating areas. Those hearings are usually thinly attended.
Master plans and comprehensive plans. CDC’s guidance on increasing physical activity through community design points state and local agencies toward exactly these documents: parks and trails plans, pedestrian and bicycle plans, comprehensive plans and zoning codes, plus walk audits conducted with residents and health impact assessments of park and trail access. Plans get written on multi-year cycles and set the priority order for a decade. The comment window is short and almost nobody uses it. Separately, every state maintains a Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan, which federal regulation requires conversions of assisted parkland to be consistent with, and those plans are periodically updated with public input.
Friends-of groups. A volunteer group attached to a specific park can do the thing the national data say matters most, which is run programming. It is the only lever on this list that does not require waiting for a meeting.
What matters most here is which question gets asked. When a local debate opens about a park, it will usually be framed as whether to build or renovate something. The national observational data say the variable most strongly associated with whether people use a park is whether anything is scheduled there and whether anyone was told. So the question worth asking at the hearing is what the operating budget for programming and staff will be in year three, after the ribbon is cut and the grant has closed.
Keep exploring: park access, PM2.5, right to repair and household water use.
Sources
- Community Preventive Services Task Force (The Community Guide). “Physical Activity: Built Environment Approaches Combining Transportation System Interventions with Land Use and Environmental Design.” thecommunityguide.org
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Increasing Physical Activity Through Community Design: Prevention Strategies.” cdc.gov
- National Park Service. “Deferred Maintenance and Repairs.” nps.gov
- National Park Service. “Land and Water Conservation Fund.” nps.gov
- National Park Service. “Land and Water Conservation Fund: State and Local Assistance Program.” nps.gov
- US Government Publishing Office (eCFR). “36 CFR Part 59: Land and Water Conservation Fund Program of Assistance to States; Post-Completion Compliance Responsibilities.” ecfr.gov
- US Government Publishing Office (eCFR). “24 CFR 91.105: Citizen Participation Plan; Local Governments.” ecfr.gov
- US Government Publishing Office (eCFR). “24 CFR 570.201: Basic Eligible Activities (Community Development Block Grants).” ecfr.gov
- National Recreation and Park Association. “2026 NRPA Agency Performance Review.” nrpa.org
- The Trust for Public Land. “10-Minute Walk.”
- The Trust for Public Land. “ParkScore Index (2026 report).” tpl.org
- Kaczynski AT, Potwarka LR, Saelens BE.. “Association of park size, distance, and features with physical activity in neighborhood parks. American Journal of Public Health, 2008. PubMed. DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2007.129064.” doi.org
- Cohen DA, Han B, Nagel CJ, Harnik P, McKenzie TL, Evenson KR, Marsh T, Williamson S, Vaughan C, Katta S.. “The First National Study of Neighborhood Parks: Implications for Physical Activity. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2016. PubMed. DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2016.03.021.” doi.org
- Cohen DA, Marsh T, Williamson S, Derose KP, Martinez H, Setodji C, McKenzie TL.. “Parks and physical activity: why are some parks used more than others? Preventive Medicine, 2009. PubMed. DOI: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2009.08.020.” doi.org
- Floyd MF, Bocarro JN, Smith WR, Baran PK, Moore RC, Cosco NG, Edwards MB, Suau LJ, Fang K.. “Park-based physical activity among children and adolescents. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2011. PubMed. DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2011.04.013.” doi.org
- Bohn-Goldbaum EE, Phongsavan P, Merom D, Rogers K, Kamalesh V, Bauman AE.. “Does playground improvement increase physical activity among children? A quasi-experimental study of a natural experiment. Journal of Environmental and Public Health, 2013. PubMed. DOI: 10.1155/2013/109841.” doi.org
- Lanza K, Alcazar M, Hoelscher DM, Kohl HW.. “Effects of trees, gardens, and nature trails on heat index and child health: design and methods of the Green Schoolyards Project. BMC Public Health, 2021. PubMed. DOI: 10.1186/s12889-020-10128-2.” doi.org