Insights from City of Olathe's Neighborhood Park Usage Study

City of Olathe’s

Neighborhood Park Usage

Study

By Ed Foley & Paul Krueger

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How did this happen? – One unanswered question

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https://youtu.be/IG5meEV1rUE

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We have to fight for resources – Doesn’t everybody???

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Management Decisions

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If we are going to do it, it should be done right

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Neighborhood Parks are hard to track

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Not doing has been a missed opportunity

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Listed all 27 Neighborhood Parks

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Created 3 Daily Time segments

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Created 3 Seasonal Time Segments

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Considered factors such as amenity usage, unique usage, hourly snapshots,

and weather considerations

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Randomized the schedule and assigned dates to complete 300

observations over 3 years with the goal of conducting about 2 counts per

week every week, year round

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Growing Pains

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Tertiary Benefits are Powerful

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The Power of Automation

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Data Dive

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Three data sets visualized in 

ClearPoint

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Park Usage



Amenities Usage

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Weather

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With all the pretty charts we almost forgot to measure our first question –

How many people visit our Neighborhood Parks in a:

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Year

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Day

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Hour

Can we answer Your Questions???

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Thank You

Neighborhood Park Visitors

Amenity Usage

Amenity Usage

Weather

Weather

Background

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The Parks and Recreation department at the City of Olathe is conducting a

series of 300 surveys of 27 parks to gather insight about visitation and amenity

usage in the neighborhood parks in the city.

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The main question the department is looking to answer is how many people use

the City’s neighborhood parks during a year?

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Tracking neighborhood parks is more difficult than tracking larger parks.

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The department sends out people to survey the parks because many of the

parks have small or no parking lots, don’t have restrooms, and have limited

amenities such as just a small shelter and a playground.

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Gathering this data will help the department determine high and low usage

rates by park, attain resources, be good stewards, and make informed

decisions dealing with neighborhood parks. Ex. Installing a new playground

Design of the Survey

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The certain park, time of day, and date for each survey were all randomly

chosen. This is to reduce bias such as just surveying on good weather days.

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The time period these surveys take place is July 2017 to June 2020.

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The three time periods during the year used for the study are: July-October,

November through February, and March through June.

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The periods are divided this way because these months are similar to each

other as far as usage in the parks. Ex. Spring activities March to June

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The survey has three day time periods: morning (8:00am-11:59am), mid-day

(12:00pm-3:59pm), and evening (4:00pm-7:59pm).

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This survey has a few main sections to it: visitor usage, amenity usage, and

weather. These will be discussed later in the presentation.

Survey Procedure

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The Parks and Recreation department utilizes their safety aid employees to

conduct surveys because they have turned out to be more reliable than

using volunteers.

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The surveyor goes out in a park ranger vehicle to the designated

neighborhood park during the specific time frame to record the responses

to the different questions.

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The surveyor then returns the survey to the Parks and Recreation

Department to be entered into the Excel file created to hold the data.

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This data is then loaded into ClearPoint to summarize findings.

Survey Visitor Usage Data

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One of the major focuses of the survey is to track the amount of visitors

coming to each park.

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A visitor is any person who visits the park. The visitors are then divided into

two measures: unique users and all present users.

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Unique users are how many people visit the park with no repeats.

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All Present users are how many people are counted at the top of each

hour for the survey. This measure includes repeats.

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The unique users are averaged for each month, and then a rolling average

is taken to see how each month compares to the overall.

Survey Visitor Usage Data Graph

Survey Amenity Usage Data

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Another major focus of the survey is to see how often amenities are being

utilized and at what times of the day they are being used.

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Four amenities are measured: shelters, playgrounds, trails, and other.

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These four amenities are then evaluated to see what percent of the time

they are being used.

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The amenities are paired up by the different survey times per amenity and

are compared against each other in graphs.

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This helps show what times of day certain amenities are popular, and it

compares which amenities are being used more than others.

Survey Amenity Usage Data Graph

Survey Amenity Usage Data Graph

Survey Weather Data

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The last major focus of the survey is weather. Weather measures are taken

to see if this affects how many visitors attend a park.

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The three main weather measures taken are: temperature, humidity, and

wind speed.

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Observations of bad weather are also recorded which include: rain/mud,

snow/ice, and wind at or over 25mph.

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The observations of bad weather data is combined with the unique users

data to see how often people visit on good days vs. bad days.

Survey Weather Data Graph

Survey Weather Data Graph

Thank you!