Urban Park Use in the United States at Census Tract 2017 - 2021

We estimated seasonal park usage for 69,450 census tracts in the contiguous US from 2017 - 2021. We defined realized park usage as the proportion of the population of a given census tract that visits a park at least once in a given week. We estimated this quantity using aggregated and anonymized data from Google users who have enabled the Location History setting, which is optional and off by default. We estimated park usage per census tract between December 2017 and November 2021 as follows. First, for the purpose of this research, we estimated the census tract of residence of each Google user each month based on where that user spent most of their time, including nights and weekends. Second, for each week, we calculated the proportion of Google users residing in a given census tract who visited any park at least once that week. Park visits lasting less than 10 minutes or greater than 4 hours were excluded; very long visits are excluded as they may be for reasons other than recreation or reflect geolocation error among those that live or work very close to a park. Note that data on the mode of transport to or from a park were not available. Thus, park visits are counted regardless of the mode of transport used. Finally, we averaged weekly estimates to obtain seasonal averages of park usage, with seasons defined based on calendar months: winter (December, January, February), spring (March, April, May), summer (June, July, August), and fall (September, October, November). This computation uses differential privacy to protect user information.