Walkability Analysis
Parks are essential components in healthy communities—access to parks facilitates increases physical activity and provides many health benefits. If access to a park is convenient without the use of an automobile, those benefits also include reduced car trips and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Pleasant Ridge residents are generally very well served in their ability to access a park close to home. The walkability analysis presented in the Walkability Map, showing 5-, 10-, and 15-minute walking times from Pleasant Ridge parks, illustrates that very few residents are more than a 5-minute walk from a City-owned park of some type, and all are within a 10-minute walk.
Facilities Benchmarking Analysis
This section compares the parks and recreation facilities in Pleasant Ridge to national benchmarks for facility provision. In 2020, the National Recreation and Parks Association (NRPA) launched a nationwide benchmarking tool called NRPA Park Metrics. This data will serve as a foundation, complemented by community-specific insights and experiences to identify the optimal combination of facilities.
Indoor Facilities Analysis
Pleasant Ridge, given its size exceeds expectations for indoor recreation facilities. Looking at the benchmark when anticipating the presence of these indoor facilities by population size it is clear most smaller communities cannot accommodate the investment and staffing.
Outdoor Facilities Analysis
Pleasant Ridge meets or exceeds the needs of residents for outdoor park and recreation facilities as shown in the Facilities Analysis Table. Similar to the indoor facilities, this analysis only provides for City owned facilities, so the outdoor recreation needs may be being met by private facilities or nearby parks in adjacent cities.
How to Interpret the Facilities Analysis Data
The data in the Facilities Inventory Table has been compiled by the National Recreation and Parks Association. It contains four key pieces of information:
- Percent of Agencies with Facilities: This percentage reflects the number of surveyed agencies that have a specific facility in their inventory.
- Median Number of Residents per Facility: This figure indicates how many people each facility serves in communities with populations under 20,000.
- Facilities Benchmark: To contextualize Pleasant Ridge’s situation, we established a benchmark by dividing the total population of Pleasant Ridge by the median number of residents served by agencies in the under 20,000 population range. These numbers have been intentionally left as decimals to helps estimate the expected presence of each facility in Pleasant Ridge based on its population size, though it should be noted that Pleasant Ridge is at the lower end of this population bracket.
- Actual Facilities: The last column of the table shows the actual number of facilities in Pleasant Ridge, allowing for straightforward comparison with the benchmark.
