Accessibility to parks metrics for six OECD countries

We estimated accessibility to parks across 496 Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) in 6 countries: Estonia, France, Greece, Mexico, Sweden, and the United States. We calculate accessibility metrics at the FUA level (metropolitan areas), High Density Clusters (HDCs) level which are cities and their surrounding commuting areas. Our final dataset includes accessibility indicators for 496 FUAs and 583 HDCs across the six selected countries. The inventory of parks was extracted from the Google Maps and Search datasets in February and March of 2022 and include more than 200,000 parks in all 496 FUAs. Park accessibility metrics were calculated at a grid level corresponding to spherical geodesics (S2 cells) of roughly 150m x 150m. We estimated walking time to the nearest park along the shortest feasible route using the Google Maps Directions API.

To estimate accessibility at a city level, for each park we compute the point-to-point navigation metrics from the surrounding populated s2 cells as the source, up to a radius of 10 km, and the park as the destination. We compute the walking time to the edge of the park using walking navigation estimates from Google Maps Directions API. When the boundary of the park is not available, we use the location (latitude, longitude) of the park centroid. We then aggregated these travel times per S2 cell to produce a population weighted median travel time to the closest park per FUA and HDC. To estimate the share of urban population with access to parks we summed the population of all S2 cells with a park available within 10 minutes of walking time around them and divided it by the city’s overall population size, calculating the percent of people that can walk to a park within 10 minutes.

The final dataset include: (1) Fraction of the population with access to parks within a 10-minute walk; (2) the median walking time to the closest park; and (3) the share of the population in each FUA with walking access to parks by income level in France and the United States.